


The Heart's Landscape

by doctorcolubra



Series: White Sky [2]
Category: Alpha Flight, Captain Britain and MI: 13, Marvel, Marvel (Comics), X-Men (Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Activism, Canadian Politics, Disability, Epilepsy, Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, M/M, Marvel Universe, Medical Experimentation, Muslim Character, Mutant Politics, Queer Themes, Roman Catholicism, Slow Build, Social Justice, Weapon X Project
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-18
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-04 23:40:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 133,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4157352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorcolubra/pseuds/doctorcolubra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Canadian superheroes, or not. In Montreal, two small-time mutant activists contend with bureaucratic humiliations, government agents headhunting mutants for a new department, and a sketchy neurological research centre. What they discover isn't pretty.</p><p>This story is a re-imagining of Alpha Flight, but you really only need to be broadly familiar with the X-Men end of the Marvel universe to follow what's going on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginnings Are Always Exciting

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, strap in.
> 
> This story takes place five years after the events of my other short novel [The Aphanes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4144677)...which is primarily a character piece, so it's not totally necessary to read that one first. It adds context. Both pieces were recced (rec'd?) by Minisinoo and [Eve Tushnet](http://eve-tushnet.blogspot.ca/2006_05_01_archive.html#114724836489753764) back in the day.
> 
> I'm taking extensive liberties with canon, but it's roughly inspired by Alpha Flight vol. 2 (i.e. the best one, with all the sinister government stuff). I'm drawing from both Marvel movies and comics for details, but this story doesn't fit into any canon timeline, really. Consider this story and Aphanes to be their own 'verse, basically.
> 
> With this story, I wanted to look at how mutant activism might look on the ground, specifically from a Catholic Worker POV -- dedicated to radical non-violence, personalism, mutual responsibility, and working directly for the marginalised of society. It's a story about people who believe in things, people trying to keep their integrity even when they're being pushed to abandon their principles. Nobody's a saint here.
> 
> (It might be relevant to mention that although I grew up Catholic, I am not one now, and this is not an uncritical portrayal. Sympathetic, not uncritical.)
> 
> Because this is a pretty old story that's been in my head for a long time, I've got a lot of accumulated side-material and other stuff. I'll post this on my [tumblr](http://famacneil.tumblr.com/tagged/aphanes-and-heart%27s-landscape), so you can look if you like.
> 
> This first chapter has a bit of frank sexuality.

_Hands are the heart's landscape. They split sometimes_  
_Like ravines into which an undefined force rolls._  
_The very same hands which man only opens_  
_When his palms have had their fill of toil._  
_Now he sees: because of him alone others can walk in peace._  
_Hands are a landscape. When they split, the pain of their sores_  
_Surges free as a stream._  
_But no thought of pain—_  
_No grandeur in pain alone._  
_For his own grandeur he does not know how to name._  
  
— Karol Wojtyla

Aurora clicked off the light in the little hotel bathroom, the whir of the fan going silent with it, and padded across the carpet. She was just barely wrapped in one of the towels (too small, itchy), but after she passed by the window she let it drop. Dance of the seven veils. In the dark, she slid back into bed beside the boy and combed her fingers lightly through his hair. It was long, sandy-blond, the first thing she'd noticed about him in the club. She'd noticed other things after that, of course: he was a mutant, and under the long hair his ears were pointed, edged with a strange soft amber-and-charcoal fur, like a caracal cat. A few piercings in those ears, little silver rings that were warm against her fingertips -- the ears twitched and he stirred, rolling over in bed to look at her. 

"Hi," he murmured, giving her a smile in the dark. Pointed teeth, too, just the canines. "You smell good. Nice and clean."

"Did I stink before? Was I grossing you out?" She let her cheek rest against his chest, which was hairy -- not fur, just regular hair, tawny and dense. She liked it. 

She'd found him at the Velvet, an underground club in the basement of the Auberge Saint-Gabriel in Vieux-Montréal. Mutant Night...she hadn't got in free, because the doorman said you had to be visible or else have ID, but once inside she'd chosen a couch-full of lurking mutants to befriend. _No, me too,_ she'd told them, cozying up to the blond boy.

She let her hand drift down across his belly. Hard muscle, nice. "What's your name?"

He lifted his head off the pillow. "Did we seriously not do names?"

"Mm-mm." The club had been loud, and they'd been busy in the cab.

"Holy _shit_ that's hot," he said, lying down again. "Wow. I'm Kyle, anyway."

She smiled, reaching down to run her fingers over his upper thighs. "You don't do this often?"

"Yeah, not to be weird? Or anything? But this is wildest dream stuff, for me." He shifted, rolling to his side, which not-coincidentally pushed his cock into her hand. "You?"

"Not often." Her fingers slid over the silky skin. "Why only wildest dreams? Because of this?" She moved to straddle his hips, reaching up to touch his face, the bristles of stubble along his jaw, the ears. "It's sexy."

"Huh," he said, sounding doubtful.

"What, you think I'm lying?" She moved slightly southward until she felt his cock pressed against her cunt. "Still think so?"

He laughed, his long teeth gleaming in the dark. "Don't get me hard again, c'mon. I should go home, I got work in the morning."

"That was a really short wildest dream."

"Ouch." He sat up on his elbow. "Sorry, okay? I gotta stay in my boss's good graces, I'm lucky to be there. Gimme your number, I'll make it up to you."

"Oh, I don't think so," Aurora said, detaching herself from him. She sat up and pulled the covers back up from the foot of the bed. "I mean, this was fun, but I don't like to do numbers."

His face sank, but he nodded, trying to play it off. "Too bad. For real, I wasn't planning to...my friend wanted to go to Velvet, I didn't think anybody would pay attention to me--"

"Hey. Don't worry. Not a big deal." She pressed a kiss to the curve of his shoulder. "Just leave me the keycard, okay?"

"Sure, yeah..." He was pulling his clothes on, but then looked over his shoulder at her. "Wait, do you not have anywhere else to stay?"

"Not in the city." It was true. "I'm playing it by ear."

"Aw, geez..."

"Well, don't sound like _that._ " She flopped back down on the pillows. "I'm working some things out. I could go home, I just don't want to. Mutant stuff."

"Okay...well..." He pulled his shirt back on. For a few moments he seemed like he was going to drop the subject, his back to her as he put his shoes on. Then he stopped and said, "Look, I'm just saying _if_ you can't line anything else up...you know about the House, right?"

"What house?"

"For mutants. Anyone can stay there, it's really chill. Let me just..." He leaned over to the bedside table and picked up the hotel-branded notepad and the pen, writing down an address. "I used to stay there, so -- now I'm telling you, the circle's complete, whatever. Do I still get to know your name?"

She smiled, a little touched that he'd bothered, against her protests. "Aurora."

"That's pretty."

"Thank you."

"You're pretty."

"I know."

"I gotta go." He got up and checked his phone, the screen filling the room with weak cyanotic light for a second, and then went to the door. "Thanks for tonight. You're really -- thanks."

"Goodnight, Kyle." She gave him a little-kid wave, one hand clapping, but was already snugging herself under the covers. Probably for the best that he was going, actually, because the bed felt nice and warm. And big. Yes, this was just fine. "Thank you too."

* * *

Jeanne-Marie woke up in a strange bed, in a strange room. A small room, but the bed was big -- it felt hard, the springs too springy, when she was used to the saggy, squashy mattress of her own bed at home. _No, oh no. Not again._

Someone was knocking at the door. "Housekeeping."

"No -- no, thank you," Jeanne-Marie said to the closed door. She groped for the lamp switch and sat up, nude between the sheets, her hair falling down over her shoulders. It had dried in strange, cornery waves, so she must have slept on it wet. "I'm fine."

"It's three o'clock, madame. Checkout time."

 _Oh no._ "All right, sorry, sorry," she said, scrambling out of bed and looking for her clothes. "Just five minutes, please, I'll get my things and go."

Her clothes were gone. Or at least _her_ clothes were gone, the clothes she'd been wearing on Friday, her skirt and her new sweater. There was a little pile of black fabric on the floor, and she thought it was a blouse until she held it up. No, that was meant to be a dress. It was just very, very short. 

Her watch was missing. Aurora might have lost it, being absent-minded. Or she might have sold it, or even had it stolen. Her little gold miraculous medal was gone too. Jeanne-Marie had no idea what day it was -- Saturday evening? How much time had gone by? The last thing she remembered was sitting down in her green armchair in her room with a blanket and a Louis de Monfort book. That was Friday, the end of her first week teaching. _Of course she'd come back to do this now. I should have known._

Lacy black panties, buried in the sheets. No stockings anywhere. Cosmetics in the bathroom, which Jeanne-Marie never wore. The black heels were hers, things she'd bought for the May formal last year, and they at least were chaste-looking, unadorned and the heel not too high. Her feet hurt, the arches aching.

A condom was floating in the toilet like a lost jellyfish. Jeanne-Marie slammed the bathroom door closed again, her eyes hot with tears.

She put the dress on, because she had no choice, and put her coat on over it. She went to the window and looked out: from here she could see the elaborate red-and-gold gate of the Quartier Chinois, a useful geographic clue. It was snowing, cars sloshing through the street below, cranes perched above the skeletons of new high-rises on the horizon. 

She searched the bed again, tearing the blankets away, hoping to find at least a pair of stockings somewhere in the tangle of sheets and covers. Maybe a bra, but that was probably expecting too much from Aurora. As she was pulling the bedspread over, she caught sight of a note on the bedside table.

St. John of God House,  
3426 Rue Sainte Famille  
(Place-des-Arts Metro)  
\- Kyle

Well, it might help. She grabbed the notepad and stuffed it in her coat pocket. She left the hotel room, gave a tight smile to the maid and her cleaning cart, and tried not to look at her own reflection in the mirrored walls of the elevator. She tugged at the skirt of her dress under her coat, trying to make it longer by sheer force of will. 

Outside, on René Lévesque, the snow was packed down on the sidewalk, uneven and slippery to walk on in her heels. Her legs were bare in the snow, and she was starting to entertain the idea of fashioning a longer skirt out of newspaper or plastic bags. Anything.

She crossed the intersection and entered the Place Desjardins shopping centre on the other side of the street. At least it was warm. She found a bookstore, a quiet place with a preoccupied shopgirl who didn't try to sell her anything. She passed the time in the mall as long as she could, putting off the inevitable. 

In her right coat pocket, she found a handful of receipts and scraps of paper. She went through them: a clothing boutique, a charge of $214; a Jean Coutu drugstore downtown, $94.13; six ATM receipts showing a balance crawling down to $5.47, withdrawals of a hundred at a time; two phone numbers in handwriting she didn't recognise, one on a torn envelope and one on a piece ripped from a photocopied biology article.

So Aurora had gone into the city and spent every cent that Jeanne-Marie had in her savings. She couldn't return the dress, because she had nothing else to wear -- what had Aurora done with Jeanne-Marie's skirt and sweater? Thrown them away? Left them in some other hotel? The dates on the receipts said at least a week had gone by.

A week.

In the left pocket of her coat, she found a cardboard STM temporary metro pass -- who knew how many days were left on it -- and a handful of small change. Maybe she should go to the Gare Centrale and call the school from there, throw herself on Madame DuPont's mercy. From there Madame could arrange a train ticket back to Deux Montagnes.

No, that wouldn't go very well.

And she had the address on the notepad, St. John of God House. She had no idea what that might be, but she did know the name of the saint. John of God, a 16th-century Portuguese bookseller who had a mental breakdown, and devoted himself to sheltering the homeless and the insane. So this was probably the address of a street shelter, a Catholic one. She didn't know why Aurora would have taken note of it (thinking ahead wasn't her style). Very possibly it was a men's shelter, or maybe it was too late now and they wouldn't let her in. But she could try it, before resigning herself to calling Madame.

She wouldn't even need the metro. Rue Sainte Famille was only a few blocks away, just past UQAM. All Jeanne-Marie wanted at the moment was to beg someone else to help her, to take her hands off the clay and her foot off the treadle. _Enough, enough._ Everything was ruined, every alarm was going off, and she was the cause of it. Let someone else begin the work of picking up the pieces.

She left the vestibule and started walking up Rue St-Urbain, shivering. Dark, the sky was lit brown outside the window, sodium streetlights reflected by the thick snow-clouds. How did Aurora get around the city, dressed like this in winter? Did she take cabs, with Jeanne-Marie's money? Did she have her men drive her around? Probably yes to both. _Don't think about it._ She kept her head down, her stride stiff and jerky, determined not to hear it if boys on the street catcalled her. Her face was hot and her legs were numb. _This will all be over soon,_ she told herself. _In just an hour you'll be inside somewhere and this will all be in the past._

When she'd passed through the UQAM campus, the tall apartment buildings gave way to greystone row houses. Number 3426 was a duplex on high ground with an imposing limestone wall at street-level, crawling with bare brown vines. Jeanne-Marie went to the door, cringing as her feet sank in the snow on the steps, and rang the bell.

A long wait. Now her feet were feeling the cold, or rather they weren't feeling it, and she wondered morbidly if she might lose a toe from this little adventure. She shifted her weight back and forth, then stopped, fearing that frostbitten toes might snap off like icicles.

No answer from within. Maybe they were closed -- she had no idea what time it was. Maybe they were just something like a soup kitchen or a reading room and wouldn't be able to help her at all. For one mad moment, she thought of breaking a window. There were no lights on inside that she could see. She was about to give up when she heard a thump and a creak within, and the door opened.

It was a young man in a black sweater, only a little older than Jeanne-Marie herself, tall and very thin with reddish hair and freckles. He took one look at her and said in French, "Wow, you look cold. Come on in, I'll put the kettle on."

She followed him in, through the dim front hallway, the staircases cornered round each other, stairs going up and going down, dark wood banisters piled with coats and hats.  On the wall was a picture in an elaborately carved wood frame with white silk roses and curls of dried palms stuck behind it, an old paper-lace postcard with an engraving of the Virgin Mary holding several little birds in her hands.  The caption read _Elle aime les faibles._   She loves the weak.

At the back of the house, the kitchen was painted pale yellow, with flowered mouldings along the ceiling that clashed with the utilitarian steel stove and formica countertops. A transit map of the city was tacked to the wall over the table, beside a poster of Our Lady of Guadalupe. On the door was a whiteboard scribbled over with bilingual messages, magazine clippings and holy cards taped up beside it. A clock on the wall read quarter past twelve, and Jeanne-Marie felt bad about her impatience with the doorbell. Where had the time gone? Had she lost a few more hours in the mall? Probably. Yes. "Did I wake you up?"

"No, it's fine. I was up anyway, I had a paper to write." His French was good, just a trace of an accent around the corners of his words, suggestions of the syncopated rhythms of English. He plugged the kettle in. "I'm gonna get you a blanket, okay?"

She just nodded, and he went off upstairs. There was a newspaper sitting out on the scarred wooden table, and she glanced at it, looking for the date. When she saw it, her throat closed up with a clicking sound.

Not one week. Two. Two weeks. Two weeks had gone by. Two weeks of her life, to say nothing of the money, gone with no explanation and for no good reason. So her job at the school was definitely history now. Madame might let her stay on washing dishes or refilling inventory in the pantry, but Jeanne-Marie could forget about teaching.

Her skin felt too tight. She couldn't even get back at Aurora...could she? What was there that Aurora cared about as much as Jeanne-Marie cared for her job, her reputation at the school, even her soul?

 _I never did anything to you,_ Aurora whispered from within. _You self-righteous bitch, I'm just trying to exist. You can't expect me to live like you do._

"Stop it," Jeanne-Marie whispered out loud, but nothing stopped. She was alone as an animal in a trap, but even alone she was watched, and she could not look back at the predators and scavengers gathering in the trees. And with a mental jerk like the sensation of falling just before sleep, she felt dizzyingly un-herself, her body and brain feeling strange, unfamiliar, contemptible. It seemed impossible that she'd ever really existed. 

The boy in the black sweater returned with a blue fleece blanket and a pair of flannel pajama pants, thick white gym socks that still had their paper label stuck to them. "I don't know if you're hungry or you just want to lie down..."

She was hungry, but she didn't know if she could face a meal right now. "I don't know -- um, is your name Kyle?"

He gave her a quizzical look, as if that were a really weird question. "No -- wait, are you looking for Kyle Gibney?"

"No, just...I met a lot of people over the last two weeks and I can't remember them all," Jeanne-Marie said, which was very true. She put the socks and pajama pants on, moving stealthily under the blanket for modesty. She gave him the hotel notepad. "Somebody gave me this address, his name must have been Kyle..."

"Oh, okay, yeah. That's his writing -- you met Kyle, eh? I haven't seen him here in a long time, I thought he must have moved on. My name's Joel, anyhow."

"Jeanne-Marie Beaubier." She kept her hands balled up in the folds of the blanket. "Is it really okay if I stay here tonight?"

"Sure, we've got an empty bed. I can take you up there now and if you get hungry later..." He opened the fridge, looking inside. "Uh, if the container's not labelled, you can have it, basically. Or anything in that cardboard box on the counter, that's some random stuff we got from Food Not Bombs, so people gotta eat it before it goes bad."

"Thank you -- I really just want to sleep, but thank you so much..." Jeanne-Marie got up, wrapped in the blanket.

"No problem, yeah. Follow me."

He led her up two flights of stairs to a small bedroom on the third floor of the house. The ceilings were sloped under the roof, small windows at knee-height with thick panels of coloured glass. The bed was next to a big old-fashioned steam radiator, and heat was breathing out in waves like water. Jeanne-Marie sat on the bed, feeling herself curl forward like a wilting plant.

"So, bathroom's at the end of the hall," Joel said, pointing out the door for her. "There's a nightlight in the outlet there, if you don't like the dark. The door locks. Breakfast's at seven. Anything else you need, I'm awake for awhile yet. You okay?"

"I'm okay. Thank you."

"Good. See you in the morning." He closed the door gently. Jeanne-Marie kept the nightlight on, grateful for it -- she hated the dark. She took off her coat and climbed into bed, where she fell asleep quickly, curled up in foetal position under the blankets. Warm and dry, miraculously. Outside, the wind rattled the windowpanes and whistled in the chimneys, but she was safe.

* * *

Joel gave up working around one, but got up early the next morning to finish his paper. He wasn't in the habit of getting up early, since he needed a lot of sleep to keep seizures and disappearances at bay, but he liked the grey silence of the city in the early hours. From his bedroom window, he had a view of snow-covered roofs and white backyards, the edges of the sun turning the bricks of the other houses coral red. Mackerel scales in the east: more snow soon.

The door opened, and Paul shuffled in, looking sheepish. He was about Joel’s age, black-haired and very pale, his skin a translucent milky colour. A dark blot like a port-wine birthmark hovered over one temple, but it faded and twisted, changing shape and colour from plum-red to pale green shot through with threads of indigo, dispersing like a group of tiny tetra fish in an aquarium, bright and flickering. Unhappy colours.

"Are we still fighting?" Joel asked, trying to be cool and not look up from his work, and failing.

"Yeah, sorry. I was a prick."

"No, you were right." It was always easier to be generous when Paul was in the mood to make concessions first, but this time it really had been Joel's fault. "I shouldn't have put that on you at the last minute, just because I was procrastinating on getting my own stuff done. I do take you for granted."

"So we're good?"

"We're good. How's the basement couch, to sleep on?"

"Not great." Paul wandered over to the dresser and pulled down his lower eyelid, looking at the white. "I think I have jaundice."

"You're fine." Paul's hypochondria was business as usual, so Joel turned back to his essay. 

"Did I see someone new downstairs, the girl with the black hair? Is she the one who rang the bell last night?"

"Yeah."

"Who is she?"

"She's new."

"Uh-huh." Paul's favourite _"you're not being helpful"_ tone.

Joel gave up, saved his file, and turned his chair around to give Paul his full attention. "Her name's Jeanne-Marie, and that's about all I know. She showed up last night barely dressed and almost freezing, so I didn't ask questions. I guess Kyle gave her the address."

" _She's_ a friend of Kyle's?"

Joel shrugged. "I got the impression she only met him once and forgot, or something like that."

"He's a hard guy to forget. That's weird, I'm surprised he's still in town," Paul said. "I would've thought he'd gone back to Vancouver. Are you seriously not done with that paper yet?"

"Almost."

Paul sighed and came to look over Joel's shoulder at the screen. " _Man Against Mass: The Challenge of Ricoeur's Hermeneutic of Revelation to Marcel's Ontological Personalism_ \-- seriously?"

"Yeah, I know the title sucks, okay? I really am almost done, I just have to fix the last paragraph and fill in...well, there's a few thin spots." The paper was already a day late, so he might have to just give up and hand it in as it was. "I'll do better with the next one."

"Hey, I don't need excuses," Paul said. "It's not my degree and it's not my vocation, what do I care? If you don't want to take it seriously, go ahead."

"Right, here we go." Joel got up to go brush his teeth. Paul followed, leaning in the doorway. "Don't start this again. I _am_ taking it seriously. I don't know what's gonna convince you."

"Does Hodya know the whole story about this yet? Because that would convince me."

Joel had been seeing Hodya Eitan, the daughter of an Israeli diplomat friend of his father's, off and on for a little over two years. It was a long-distance relationship, as she was in microbiology at U of T, and more friendly than passionate. They were both fine with that, but for some reason Paul had the ability to make that fact sting like Borax in an open wound. "I'm not going to fight with you about my love life at this hour, Paul."

"We're fighting?"

"Yeah, that was kind of a low blow, man," Joel said around the toothbrush.

"Sorry."

"Sure." He spat into the sink and wiped his mouth. "I'm wondering about maybe having separate rooms."

Paul immediately became more subdued, blushing a dusty purple the colour of a bruise. "For real?"

"Yeah, for real. I know we thought it was more important to keep an extra room free, but at this point..."

Paul said nothing. He didn't like to let Joel trail off.

"At this point I feel like you're picking at me a lot, and we need some space."

A long silence. Joel didn't dare look over to see what colours were moving across Paul's face, so he busied himself with the Listerine, ignoring his peripheral vision.

At last, Paul said, "I don't do that. Not on purpose."

"I know you don't." Joel had to unlock the medicine cabinet to get his daily meds; the lock was an unfortunate necessity, and they'd found out the hard way. His pills were in a days-of-the-week container with the little doors, something that Paul had resisted doing so far with his own meds. Topiramate, lamotrigine, clonazepam, and a garnish of buspirone. His neurologist wasn't sure what the buspirone was even doing, but it seemed to help the cocktail work better overall. And a prenatal multivitamin, despite his lack of a uterus, because the anti-convulsants depleted his body of folic acid and vitamin D. He knocked them all back with a few gulps of water. "Neither do I, not on purpose, but it happens. This is just -- we're bouncing off each other too much, and it's affecting the atmosphere in the house. Don't tell me you wouldn't like some privacy, some days."

"No," said Paul, sounding perhaps more earnest than he had intended to. "I wouldn't. I like -- I like rooming with you."

Joel risked a glance over at Paul in the mirror. Green, which usually meant agitation and embarrassment. Paul couldn't lie to anyone who knew him well, and he generally didn't try. He was honest by nature, and quick to catch deception in others, aided by an odd, olfactory form of empathy that went with his mutation. So he meant it, and yet Joel couldn't resist saying, "Really?"

"No, it's a joke I made up. Yeah, _really._ " Annoyed now, and that was more in character. Joel relaxed.

"Well, fine. Just stop riding my ass, okay?"

"Whatever," said Paul, pushing off from the doorframe and going to the dresser. Back to normal. "You're doing breakfast, right, comrade?"

"Yeah, yeah."

Downstairs in the kitchen, Joel started the oatmeal while Paul rustled through the front section of _Le Devoir_. More snow was now coming down, small flakes that were almost invisible unless you looked hard. Pouring the salt for the porridge into the palm of his left hand, Joel suddenly felt his body become somehow more real, more physical, every cell biting hard on the air. It was a feeling that came over him sometimes just before a seizure, so he put down the box of salt and waited, but nothing happened. He felt either very happy or very empty, and at first he could not quite tell which.

Empty, Joel decided. Empty to the corners.

The kids were mostly awake, including Jeanne-Marie, who was still wearing her winter coat over the pajama bottoms, sitting in a corner with a book and trying to be very small. Joel understood that, if he understood nothing else, and his first instinct was to pretend not to see her. But he'd learned that his instincts weren't really a reliable guide in these situations. "Want to help set the table?"

"Oh -- of course, yes, I can do that." She put the book aside and ventured closer. "I don't know how you like to do it."

"There's twelve of us, so give everyone a plate and a bowl. The cupboard's on your left -- that one, yup." The cutlery was in bins on the counter island, and people served themselves, but Joel felt it was important to set the plates on the table first, one at each chair. It was a way of saying not just that food was available, but that a place was set for everyone. He wasn't sure if any of the kids noticed or cared, but it mattered to him. "Did you meet Paul already? This is Paul Laliberté, my -- he works here too." He often said _partner_ , but sometimes backed off from the word when he thought it might be misunderstood. "Paul, Jeanne-Marie."

Jeanne-Marie gave him a tiny wave. _"Bonjour."_

Paul gave her one of his appraising looks, but then just smiled, as if she'd passed some private test of his. _"Salut."_

"Whenever you feel like it we can talk about why you're here or what you need," Joel said. "If you want, anyway. You don't have to."

"I do need to speak with you," she said, setting her stack of plates down on the table. "I'm ready, just...if we could talk privately..."

"Okay. Paul, make sure the porridge doesn't burn?"

 _"Ouais,"_ he drawled, turning a page of the newspaper.

Joel led Jeanne-Marie through the kitchen door to the other side of the duplex, where the house office was. It was a refurbished dining room, with a four-bulbed brass chandelier and a large bay window looking out over the backyard, the radiators on either side painted black with complex Moroccan-style grilles. In contrast, the furniture was shoddy Naugahyde donated by the rectory of Saint-Sulpice, and the filing cabinet was made of cardboard.

Jeanne-Marie sat down on the tattered loveseat and Joel pulled out the computer chair. "So what's going on?"

She stared down at her knees. "I go to -- I teach at Madame DuPont's School for Girls in Deux Montagnes."

She stopped there, as if he should find this fact significant. Madame DuPont's, Madame DuPont's...oh. _Oh._ "Not the school run by the, um, the--" 

_Schismatic_ was a rude word to use, and _splinter group_ was a little dismissive too. Joel decided to wait and let her supply him with a label.

"We are traditional Roman Catholics," she said primly. "We're attached to the Petites Soeurs de Notre Dame de Fatima. Madame DuPont isn't a sister, of course, but some of them teach at the school."

"Right. Okay. Notre Dame de -- so you guys are connected with the Pères de la Société de Notre Dame de Fatima?"

"That's right."

"That's pretty hardcore," said Joel. The SNDF were a weird group of sedevacantists who rejected Vatican II and the current pope, and had elected a pope of their own in Quebec City. The guy had stigmata, or so Joel had heard. "Okay, sorry, go on."

"But I left. Without telling anyone."

He didn't blame her. The SNDF were rumoured to be abusive, and in a small, reactionary group like that he would have been more surprised to learn that they _weren't_ shitty. "Yeah?"

"No, you don't understand," she said, some heat coming into her voice. "I _left._ That's where I'm from. I was a student there, an orphan, since I was tiny. I didn't just leave a job, I left everything. And now I don't have anywhere to go."

"That sounds really rough." It was one of the first things Joel had learned to say to kids who came to the house, the simplest form of validation, and even when he thought he sounded unbearably fake and clichéd, somehow it still seemed to make people relax when they heard it. A basic acknowledgement, something he wouldn't have known to give if he hadn't been taught. "And you definitely don't want to go back."

"No. Well...no."

She wasn't sure, he thought. Sometimes it was hard for him to draw even simple conclusions like that about people -- he got flustered and couldn't think about anything but himself and all the things he was doing wrong. But now, letting his physicality relax just a little into the Aphanes, he managed to really look at her.

She sat with her back straight and her lips closed, not looking him in the eye but in the nose, her gaze sometimes drifting over to his shoulder or the wall behind him. Her face was sharp and pretty, with huge blue-grey eyes and very long black hair, braided over one shoulder. Her hands lay in her lap, folded and still, but he saw that her right elbow was moving, convulsing slowly and rhythmically, as if she'd always been nervous and twitchy but someone had trained her out of the habit. But never completely. "Is that what you do?" she said, watching him. "Your mutation?"

He'd gone too far into it. He hadn't meant to, but lately it felt good. Too good, like napping while sleep-deprived. Joel slipped back into solidity. "Sorry. Yes. It is."

"You looked like a ghost." She looked down at the carpet. "I'm a mutant too."

"Well, yeah. I mean, I assumed," he said. "Which I shouldn't do, I guess, but this place is for mutants. Sometimes baseline people show up and we help if we can, but we try to centre mutants and give them priority."

"I don't know anything about this place. I just came because I thought you were Catholic."

"Uh, we are?" he said, not sure he was being critcised or not. "Like it's not a homogenous group and we don't make people subscribe to any belief system, but the house is still a Catholic Worker house. I'm Catholic."

"You believe it, in all of it?" she asked. "You're not a dissenter?"

Joel hesitated and then said, "I think that word probably means something totally different to you than it does to me. I'm not an SNDF type, I'm a lefty anarchist peacenik. But yeah, I believe. Why?"

"I want to know if I can trust you," she said.

It felt a little like a dick-measuring contest, even though her tone was completely civil. "Well, we probably disagree about a lot of stuff, but you can still trust people while disagreeing with them, right? Uh, I'm in discernment with the Dominicans, if that helps establish my Catholic cred here at all. I go to L'Institut Pastorale, hacking out a theology degree."

"Really?" It did seem to help, and she sat back in the loveseat. "All right, that's good. The Dominicans aren't too bad."

Usually Joel had to reassure kids that they _weren't_ missionaries, that no one was going to push religion on them, that it wasn't about saving souls. He had to play the opposite game with diocesan representatives, of course, convincing them that they weren't secularists and should still get community support from Saint-Sulpice and the other local parishes. The whole business made him uncomfortable, and he knew that nothing about the house would impress hardliner traditional Catholics. 

The girl licked her lips and said, "I'm asking because I'm not...not _completely_ sure I'm a mutant. Maybe something else is happening to me. But I don't want someone who's an apostate to be giving me advice about mutants or anything else. I don't mean that as an insult, just..."

"I think I get what you're worried about," said Joel slowly. "I just don't know who to refer you to. Like I could connect you with a local priest here at Saint-Sulpice, or one of the Dominican friars, but..."

"They're conciliar."

"Right." _Conciliar_ meant the whole mainstream Church, after the Second Vatican Council in the '60s. "So you only want to talk to a traditionalist about this, but you don't want to go back to Madame DuPont's."

"I want to talk to _you_ ," Jeanne-Marie said, a little impatiently now. "Because you're the one in front of me. But I don't want you to just dismiss everything I say because I'm traditional and you're not."

"Oh, okay. I got you." That was easier than trying to track down and vet a TradCat priest in the city. He'd been overthinking this. "Look, don't worry. I'm not trying to sell you on anything, I'm just here to listen. Can we backtrack for a second here? Why do you say you're not completely sure you're a mutant? You haven't had your DNA checked?"

She shook her head. "We didn't...no, after it happened we didn't go to the government. I know there are forms and tests, but we didn't do them."

"We can get that process started for you, if you want help with it. But you think it might not be a mutation, so -- can you walk me through what happened? What abilities do you have?"

She shook her head again, a glimmer of tears appearing in her eyes. She made a couple of attempts to speak through the tears, then whispered, "I'm not dangerous or anything. I never use them."

"Nobody here is worried about dangerous powers, okay?" This was true. One of the kids in the house was the most dangerous mutant in the province and maybe the country, but somehow they all slept through the night just fine. "It's all right."

"I'm sorry I'm so--" She stopped, and quickly plucked a tissue from the box on Joel's desk. She held it to her face as tightly as if she were trying to stop a flow of blood, and said nothing more.

Joel wanted to comfort her, but he still wasn't good at guessing what other people found comforting. Whenever he touched people it felt oppressively purposeful; he couldn't just casually hold someone's hand or touch a shoulder, and people picked up on his nervousness. He'd been running the house for five years, and his social skills had improved a lot since his days with Professor Xavier, but he still didn't know what to do when people started crying. He usually sat in silence, hoping that the mere presence of another person was at least a little helpful. That it was better than nothing. 

Finally he said, "Listen, how about we take this up again later? You might feel a little safer talking about it once you know us better. And you can stay here as long as you need to."

"I hope I can," she whispered. "Thank you. Um -- my clothes--"

Practical things were easier to deal with. "We're low on clothes for young women, since we got cleaned out last week. Arlette's free today, I think, so she can probably take you around to Value Village or somewhere to get a few things."

"I spent all my money," Jeanne-Marie said, an edge of hysteria creeping into her voice. "I've got nothing left. I had everything I needed at Madame's, and money besides, and now I've got nothing, nothing..."

"It's okay, it'll be all right."

"No, no, it won't..."

"Yes, it will. You need clothes, you'll get them. We have a discretionary fund and that's what it's for. Don't worry about that. But your things at Madame DuPont's, is there anything you really want to have back? I can go back there and tell them you've left, pick up your stuff, you won't have to see them at all."

They made a list of things that she needed, including her glasses and a couple of books that she'd bought with her own money. "Most of my clothes were issued by the school," she said. "I had a couple of outfits for teaching, but Madame bought those. They aren't really mine."

"Well, when you go shopping with Arlette, whatever you buy really is yours, okay?" Joel said. "Go ahead and get some breakfast, I'll be there in a few."

When she was gone, he slumped back in his chair and looked at his class schedule, taped down on his desk. The morning was free to take a banlieue train to Deux Montagnes, and then get back to the city for the Gospel of Mark lecture in the afternoon. And...oh fuck, the paper. Well, it was going to be turned in half-baked and that was that. Paul was right that he'd been half-assing his school work lately, and he was probably also right that Joel just didn't have the energy to devote to a degree right now. _But I could try harder._

He took his cheque-book out of the desk drawer and realised he had no idea how much clothes for Jeanne-Marie would set them back. How in the hell was that possible, that he still didn't know what clothes cost for women? How fucking out of touch was he?

A cold wave of horror broke over him suddenly, and he felt his innards seize up. For some reason, the image that came to mind was of the damned souls on Michelangelo's altarpiece, with their tight fists clutching and scrabbling for safety, grasping at nothing. All the dead shrieking and crying, as if they hadn't suffered enough, while Christ hung far above with one hand upraised, a feudal lord telling the peasants to get off his property. The image slid, spread, and shook apart into fragments. Nobody was listening, and nobody would say a word, even though the doom was everywhere now, in his nostrils and between the tree branches outside, under the papers on his desk and between the fibres of the carpet. Everywhere. Joel felt like he was being sucked out of his body, like a snail from its shell, and if he let go he wouldn't get back. His mind was pushing, pushing, urgent with a nameless desire to do something, but he couldn't move.

And then it was over.

Joel raised his hand to his face, and it came away wet, but it was only saliva and not blood. _Relax._ It took him a few minutes to get his bearings again. At home. Still morning, still early. Sounds of pots and pans banging from the kitchen. Just a small seizure in the temporal lobe, no big deal. The irrational fear had been an aura, and then he'd lost awareness for a minute or so. Even now he couldn't remember the aura itself, memory unravelling behind him. A boat that cut no wake. _And we're back._

When he could trust himself with words again, he signed the cheque, left the amount blank, and wrote "please be gentle" on the memo line. Whatever "gentle" might mean to Arlette. On the back of his hand, he wrote the time and the note _TLS – Comp. Part._ , in case he forgot to make an appointment with Dr. Stein. 

He set the pen down, and with a feeling of incomparable relief, dropped into complete invisibility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, Madame DuPont's is supposed to be in "LaValle" or maybe "LaVelle", not Deux Montagnes. Did John Byrne mean Laval? Who knows? But we know the school is in the Montreal region but kind of out in the boondocks, so I arbitrarily placed it in Deux Montagnes, a town accessible to Montreal by commuter train but still pretty small.


	2. The Seat Is Empty, His Place Does Not Know Him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one might be worth a trigger warning for abusive religious environments. Nothing graphic, but just be aware.

_There is no love where there is no obstacle_  
_There is no love where there is no bramble_  
_There is no love on the hacked-away plateau_  
_And there is no love in the unerring_  
_And there is no love on the 'one true path'_  
—Bill Callahan

A steady stream of mutant kids came in to St. John of God House from seven until one or two in the afternoon on most days. They ranged from addicts who might be dead within a year to kids with homes who were just skipping school, looking for a place to spend the day away from bullies and cliques. They got breakfast, watched cartoons on TV, used the WiFi, charged their phones, talked to each other, read books and old magazines from the house's motley library, played euchre or board games, and did homework (or pretended to). A few, like Paul, had special dietary needs, and one of the fridges was full of specialty foods: duck eggs, moose moss, cock's combs, sheep's milk, dulse, corn smut, burdock roots, calf brains, and red locusts. Paul, a bit of a gourmand, enjoyed hunting for the unusual in the Atwater and Jean-Talon markets, in the Asian grocery stores in Chinatown, and on the occasional trip to a nursery or pet supply store. He ate a lot of canned silkworm pupae himself, and the non-visible mutants tended to freak out about it, which he always answered in his best R.M. Renfield voice: _"Actually, they're perfectly nutritious. You see, each life that I ingest gives back life to me...I need lives, lives for the master..."_

So the kids got over it.

Joel came out of the east side of the house almost an hour after Jeanne-Marie, and he was looking a little vague. That wasn't exactly unusual; even on a good day he was inclined to space out, but when his seizures got bad his body often took on untenanted look, like a car without a driver ploughing through lanes of traffic. Systems on automatic. There were spectrums and ranges, and Paul had learned to pay attention.

After serving breakfast, Paul was having a second cup of coffee while he was on hold with Hydro Québec. Joel sat down with him, pouring out the last of the tea into his mug from the National Gallery, which had a design by Norval Morrisseau. _Man Changing Into Thunderbird_ , a title that Paul hadn't understood at first. The image just looked like a thunderbird, beak and wings and talons, no human features. _It's the last in a series,_ Joel had said, and showed him the original six pictures. Then it made sense, seeing the man being slowly overtaken by the wings, the claws, the beak. Joel liked the middle stages best, saying, _It looks messy and terrifying and amazing, like something out of Ezekiel. And it doesn't look anything like the end result. It looks like changing into a thunderbird is nothing like being a thunderbird._

Paul thought about that a lot in the mornings, when he saw the mug. He angled the phone receiver away from his mouth, to show that he wasn't actually busy, and bumped Joel's arm with his elbow. "What, did you fall asleep in there?" 

"What? Uh, sort of. Remind me to call Dr. Stein."

"Shit." Dr. Stein was Joel's neurologist, the best in the city and the only one who could begin to make sense of Joel's damaged and mutated brain. "I can call her for you as soon as I'm done with Hydro."

"It's not a big deal."

"It's your fucking brain, of course it's a big deal." Part of Paul's mutation was something like the reverse of the display on his skin; he got intuitions about people's feelings, and was very rarely wrong. It wasn't like a telepathic empathy, but rougher, unpredictable, scents and tastes in the back of his mouth. Joel often had a eucalyptus tang of worry around him, but he was seriously worried about something now, a bright onion-stem cloud of it. The smell always made Paul irritable, even though he knew he should be sympathetic. If they worried together it wasn't as bad. "Aren't you going to eat anything?"

"Not now. Did you see Niko come in?"

"No."

Most of the kids didn't hang around long enough for Joel to get very talkative with them, but he was always around, in varying degrees of visibility, letting the conversations flow around him. Paul was chattier, and they both kept close tabs on who was showing up and who'd drifted away. Sometimes people disappeared, and you didn't know if it was because things had got better for them or if things had gotten much, much worse. Usually there was nothing you could do about it: you asked around, you maybe made a futile police report, and that was it. Whenever Paul was out on the street he kept catching sight of people who looked familiar, but he was often wrong.

Maybe the poor sods were fine, maybe they'd gone home or headed to Niagara to pick fruit or won a million in the 6/49. In reality, a lot of them were simply institutionalised. Police had the authority, thanks to the Gatineau Accords, to pick up mutants on the street and put them in lockup or in psychiatric wards, or in recently-established "safety centres." There were over a hundred safety centres in the city alone, big ones and small ones, popping up like mushrooms after rain. While Joel and Paul might call a few likely ones to see if they could bail a kid out, there just wasn't time to search them all.

Hydro finally put his call through, and Paul got his actual business done in two minutes. After he'd hung up, he waited for a lull in the conversation before asking, "Where's Niko been lately?"

The other shrugged, but Requin grinned, displaying his rows of sharp teeth. He couldn't speak much, but he could sign, and they'd been learning to understand. "Got a job."

"Oh. Good for her. With who, d'you know?"

"Ottawa somewhere," Requin signed.

"RCMP," Prawn put in, his mouth full. "Or wait, maybe not them. She said it was government security, so I guess we assumed it was doing something for the Mounties, but I don't really know how that stuff works."

"No, that doesn't sound like RCMP," Joel said doubtfully. "She might have meant something like museum guarding or doing security in government buildings. That's plausible as an entry-level deal. But I don't know if they'd take someone with a record."

"I doubt it," said Paul.

"Yeah. Huh."

"If you find anything out, get me an interview too," said Prawn. "I got fired a couple of days ago."

Prawn always had good stories whenever he got fired, so the others teased him to cough it up. Joel leaned back in his chair and said to Paul, "Want to come up to Deux Montagnes this morning?"

"What's in Deux Montagnes?"

"Well...sedevacantists?" At Paul's blank look, he elaborated, "Conclavists, actually, since they have their own pope. Heretics, schismatics. Jansenists and Feeneyites. Et cetera. You know."

"Are they sending you out on Dominican ninja missions already? Are you gonna go all Torquemada on them?"

"Torquemada, I love you." Joel had a good laugh when he let himself, surprisingly hoarse and far down in his throat, a strange corvid cackle that Paul liked because it was real: nobody faked having a weird laugh. "No, it's house stuff, not the Spanish Inquisition. Even just a ride to the Gare Centrale would be good."

"Don't give up so easily, you almost had me sold on going out there. But yeah, I can take you to the station."

"Good. I owe you."

"I hope that means Chambord and caviar at Christmas?"

"Not together, I hope?" Joel scribbled his itinerary on the whiteboard and added, _Class all afternoon –- text only. back at 5._

"Are you kidding, of course not. Caviar goes with Jewel of Russia, ice-cold. Chambord is for dessert."

"And Smirnoff just won't do, right? What'll dessert be, a cake trimmed with diamonds?"

"The reason you keep me around," Paul said, "is to stop you from doing things like serving Smirnoff with caviar, like some kind of animal. Don't give me the lecture on Lady Poverty, either."

"Gold-digger," said Joel, affectionately. "Come on."

 

Gare Centrale was not far away, but it was a long drive in the thick powdery snow. Paul wound through side streets to avoid the manic Montreal drivers. He had never been one. He won his license after six attempts, six expensive tests and innumerable panic attacks. At last the only thing that helped was pretending, telling himself _it doesn't matter, these other cars are asteroids, they are mindless forces of nature and if they hit me they'll hit me and that's their problem, not mine._ He had a long prepared monologue of this false equanimity, and didn't believe it, but he could imagine a self that did believe it, and he lived in the corridor between that self and the real one. That was what it meant to be healthy, he thought -- you learned a repertoire of other selves, pastiches to cover all the sore places in the real one. With his mutation constantly betraying him, Paul was at a natural disadvantage, but he'd learned how to conceal.

Joel, beside him, had a book about the epistles open on his lap but was looking out the window at the falling snow. The sharp onion smell of anxiety was back, dulled a bit because he was tired. He glanced across at Paul and said, "So what'd you think about Jeanne-Marie?"

"I barely talked to her."

"You didn't have to, you were giving her one of your looks."

"I give looks to everybody," said Paul. "What's the connection with these guys in Deux Montagnes?"

Joel talked about Jeanne-Marie, and Paul listened, letting ideas float in as if on an underground river while his conscious mind was absorbed in driving. He could clearly remember the smell that hung around Jeanne-Marie. Chemical strawberry and cough syrup with...something rustly. Garlic peel and onion skins. Landfill smells, but harsher.

"She's hiding something," said Paul. "She's doing something wrong and she knows it. You know that feeling you get when you're poking around, maybe in the woods somewhere, and all of a sudden you touch something that crumbles away, something soft and rotten?"

Joel nodded, saying nothing.

"Lots of kids who come in smell like that, you know. They're lying. Obviously everyone lies, but you know how it is -- people lie more when they're in trouble. Usually whatever they're lying about isn't any of our business anyway, no big deal, but the smell of it is still gross. It's hard to breathe, it gets in your lungs."

"How do you deal with that?" Joel asked. He was half-visible; Paul didn't have to look to see the difference. There was no warmth, no sound of breathing, no smells, none of the tiny cues that make up human presence except for the lingering sense of being watched. A hovering intelligence, not what the soul was made for. "No wonder you don't like leaving the house."

"My precious, sad, vulnerable self," said Paul, turning onto Rue de la Gauchetière. "I'm out now, right? I'm fine if there are other people with me. What I don't like is being stared at, anyway. Smelly emotions aren't such a problem."

"Still."

"Everyone's got their thing. We all learn how to deal with it somehow."

"Sorry, with what?"

"With, I don't know, with having a unique perspective on how shitty the world is. You know what I'm talking about," Paul said. The street was very narrow here, just one lane sandwiched between rows of parked cars. "Mutants have a different experience of reality. Only a handful of people in human history have experienced the kind of stuff we do. And that's kinda lonely." 

"I always liked the idea that maybe some of the saints were mutants," Joel said, watching the passing traffic at the intersection. "The weird ones who levitated and stuff. But they were probably lonely too."

"I don't rule it out. We're _different_ , and Magneto's not wrong about everything. Maybe we're not superior, but there's something we know about the world that humans don't know." He paused. "I know how that sounds, but..."

"I know," Joel said. "I'm not gonna smack your knuckles with a ruler for saying mutant supremacists might possibly have a point about something."

"I'm your problematic fave."

"Yeah, but you actually are, though. What were we talking about?"

"About Jeanne-Marie," Paul reminded him. "You're out of it today, are you sure you want to be going all the way out to the banlieues?"

Joel had faded back to solidity, and gave a jaw-cracking yawn, but he said, "No, I'll shake it off. Ha ha, so punny. I'll just go, ask a few questions, pick up her stuff, and come back. You can't park here, don't stop--"

Paul gave up in the middle of an ill-fated attempt at parallel parking; the space really wasn't big enough for it, but a car had to swerve around him and he leaned on the horn, unrepentant. " _Bout de viarge_ , now I gotta go around the block, great. Are you going to find out about Jeanne-Marie's manifestation while you're out there? Because I don't think her major problems are money and heretics."

"I'll ask about it, just to see what they say." They came around the block again. "You really can come with me, you know."

Paul flexed his fingers around the steering wheel. The skin was running with scarlet, melon, and white-gold, and Joel would know what that meant, as he always did but pretended not to. "I don't think I'd better."

* * *

From the Gare Centrale, Joel took the train alone to Deux Montganes, a soporific trip in this weather, although he didn't dare let himself fall asleep. He was trying to study, and failing. A fierce wind swept snow across the river ice, the snow taking shapes that looked to him like running human figures, and in the city the ploughs were out on the streets, whirling their blue lights. So dark that it didn't look like morning, nor like any particular time of day. Dark mornings like this held a sense of expectation, for Joel -- he associated them with snow days, with waking up early for trips. Time folding back on itself, he thought as he tried to force himself to pay attention to one of Karl Rahner's convoluted sentences. As if morning might decide it wasn't coming after all, forget it, turn the lights back on and stay inside.

He took a cab from the station, because Madame DuPont's school was situated out in a trackless waste of golf courses and farms. Very unfriendly to pedestrians. And that was weird: most schismatic groups were tiny, and therefore strapped for cash, operating out of erstwhile storefronts and small church buildings. Joel wondered where Madame DuPont had got the money for her nice converted private school -- wealthy benefactors, a determined shaking of the parishioners by their ankles, fraud?

_Or like, maybe she got it the same way you got yours, you giant hypocrite?_

The school was on a sizeable property with a winding drive and a wrought-iron fence out front. Rows of fat blue spruces hid the grounds from view, and a sign beside the gate read "Private Property: No Trespassing." Joel took a moment to consider the sign as the cab pulled away. He decided he wasn't a trespasser so much as an unsolicited guest, and started the trek through the snowy grounds to the door.

He stayed submerged in the Aphanes, enough to avoid getting soaked to the knees by the time he got to the front steps. In the shadowy front hall, he came across a tall painted plaster statue of Our Lady, with a long Latin inscription on the wooden pedestal. The Virgin was in the usual Immaculate Heart position, pulling her cloak aside with both hands like Superman to display the heart. There was no picture of the current Pope on the wall, either the real one or the Québécois stigmata guy, but there was one of Pius X, staring sternly out of the frame from a holy-card background of fluffy clouds.

"Are you looking for something?"

Joel turned. A sister -- a very young-looking sister -- in full royal blue habit. Not a hair exposed by the coif and wimple, skirt long enough to hide her feet, hands folded under a black scapular. The effect was jarring, like meeting someone in a suit of armour. He'd seen traditional habits before, of course, but not often; big feast days at church and teachers in costumes on Marguerite Bourgeoys Day were it.

"Um -- I'm here to see Madame DuPont. Sister."

She smiled. "Do you have an appointment? Or are you a parent?"

That was even weirder, being mistaken for an adult. "No, I'm not -- I don't have an appointment. I'm here about the girl who went missing." She was wearing two veils, he thought, so she had to be older than a novice, but he could swear she was younger than he was. "Madame DuPont has some time to talk about that, right?"

"What girl who went missing?" The sister sounded sceptical.

Surely they'd noticed the girl's absence. Weren't they worried? Weren't they looking for her? "Jeanne-Marie Beaubier...?"

The sister pursed her lips for a moment, then turned and strode briskly down one hall, her rosary clicking at her side. "Follow me, please."

The halls were empty, but as they passed by the classrooms he could hear teachers lecturing in singsong intonation, the pupils responding in the same. Some older students were learning the first conjugation in Latin, the distinctive _amo-amas-amat_ rhythm thudding dully like a heartbeat.

The sister left Joel sitting on a bench outside the office, where he sat for almost half an hour, listening to the chirrup of the phone and the muffled sounds of a scolding coming from the principal's office. It reminded Joel too much of being sick, or in trouble, back in his own school days. Right down to the squeak of wet boots and the distant hum of a custodian's floor-polisher. He felt his tiredness creeping up on him, and had almost nodded off when he heard a sharp crack come from inside the principal's office.

Again, and then again. Pause. Another group of three cracks. Another. Then a long silence. He didn't let his breath out.

At last a very small girl of no more than seven ran out the door, rubbing her eyes. Joel stood up, but the door slammed shut. The girl kept running down the hall and disappeared into one of the classrooms.

 _Charming._ He uncapped his pen and took note of the time and date in his notebook, along with the number of smacks he'd overheard. Reporting this probably wouldn't be very effectual, but he'd do it anyway. There wasn't anything else he could do about it. He rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes, hating himself a little for -- for something. His mouth tasted sour.

Several long minutes later, the door opened again.

Madame DuPont was built wide but hard and thin, like a board fence. No softness to her, nothing that suggested she ever satisfied any human needs. She wore a long, high-collared black dress that looked homemade, with a sagging waistline and a graceless skirt, the whole thing made of some cheap material that wouldn't hang properly. Her greying hair was tied back under a black scarf, so tight that her face looked a bit stretched. She had small, round eyes and eyebrows that seemed perpetually raised.

She let him in, saying, "Please excuse the open door, monsieur. For modesty." She didn't introduce herself or shake his hand, but after she came around to take her seat behind the desk she said, "And you are?"

Joel introduced himself. "I own Maison St-Jean-de-Dieu in the city. The, uh, the mutant Catholic Worker house. It's in Milton Parc, near Saint Sulpice--"

"Yes, I know it," she interrupted. "Go on."

"I'm here on Jeanne-Marie Beaubier's behalf. There are a few belongings that she'd like to have back, so if it's all right with you, I'll bring them to her. And she wanted to let you know that she's safe, and that she doesn't plan on coming back to the school."

Madame DuPont smiled, lips closed. "She is always welcome to come back. I'm afraid we may be the only place that can help her -- no offense to you, monsieur."

"How do you mean?"

"I don't wish to cause scandal by repeating the faults of another. But she is very troubled. Very troubled," she repeated, twisting her pen between her fingers. "It's unfortunate. We won't force her to come back, of course. But it's the only option. I hope you will see this and tell her so yourself."

Joel wanted to probe what "troubled" might mean, without asking for information he had no right to ask about. "Well...can I ask what you were doing for her here? Has she seen a doctor?"

"A _psychiatrist_?"

Misstep, back-pedal. "An ordinary doctor. Or a therapist, social worker. Anyone."

"Our school nurse examined her and said she was physically fine. One of the priests here gave her some counselling."

Joel put a few more questions to her and found out that Jeanne-Marie had no family doctor -- students were taken to a clinic in Laval when they were sick. The nurse and the priest were the only help available for mental illness; Madame DuPont, it seemed, did not approve of secular psychiatry, which surprised Joel not at all.

"There is nothing wrong with her that human medicine can cure," she said. "Her problems are in the soul. The best you can do for her is pray. If you pray."

Joel let that one go. He said, "Can you show me to her room, please?"

She frowned, as if she wanted to disapprove of the request just on principle, but then she got up and led him out of the office.

Upstairs, in the small wood-panelled garret that was Jeanne-Marie's quarters, Madame DuPont stood in the doorway while Joel tried to soak in any information that was there to be found. Neatly-made bed, a crumpled blanket on the chair. He wished Paul were with him, although Paul didn't pick up so much from objects as he did from people.

The only things Joel noticed were Jeanne-Marie's glasses and the St. Louis de Montfort book lying open on the table. Louis de Montfort was sticky Marian piety of the syrupy, candy-coated 19th-century variety, a favourite among traditionalists and conservatives. The book was dog-eared and soft with age, and Jeanne-Marie's name was written on the flyleaf. "Is she very devout?"

Madame DuPont was silent for a long moment, but when he turned she said, "She's mad. Whatever she tells you...you should take it with a very large grain of salt."

"I'm sorry?"

"I'm not saying this out of spite, or to make you think less of her. But Jeanne-Marie isn't properly in control of what she does, and you can't believe anything she says. She's a habitual liar -- that's just a fact, monsieur, not an insult. She is a mutant and she tried to hide the fact from us. Even you would disapprove of that, I imagine. But this isn't about her mutation; her mutation's nothing very troublesome in and of itself. Père Chevannes said he examined her carefully and saw no signs of possession, but she's in a very deep state of bondage to Satan, I'm afraid."

That was a lot to take in. Joel tried to figure out where to begin. "Well, okay, just to address your speculation about what I'd approve of -- no, I don't blame people for hiding their mutations, not unless they're hiding it while also hurting other mutants. She probably thought it wouldn't be received well."

"'Received well?' What does that mean? Approving of it? Celebrating it? Glorifying mutants as superior beings?" She guided him to sit down in the worn armchair, her hand carefully several inches from his arm, and she sat before him on the ottoman. "Are you a faithful Catholic?"

He was tired of this question. "It's like Joan of Arc said at her trial, right? If I am not, may God make me one; if I am, may He keep me one."

Madame DuPont gave him a more sincere smile at that, but she said, "I think that's a careless paraphrase. Joan was being asked about whether she was in a state of grace, which is a tricky subject, and her answer was meant to avoid the sin of presumption. I didn't ask you such a hard question; you should have been able to give me a whole-hearted answer. You're not on trial, either."

"Yeah? Sometimes I wonder. Okay, then yes. Unqualified yes, no caveats."

"I'm glad to hear that. I'll tell you what I told Jeanne-Marie, and I hope you can listen. Both for yourself and for her." She folded her thin hands on her knees. "Mutants have a special vocation in the world. They are called to be witnesses to the ruin of original sin, the damage caused to nature by rebellion against God's grace. Have you read about the apparitions of Our Lady at Orloo?"

"Uh..." Joel didn't honestly give much of a shit about Marian apparitions. "Have they been approved by -- right, yeah, I guess that doesn't matter to you guys..."

"The current bishop of Rome is in heresy," said Madame DuPont. "So no, we're not interested in his approval. When he restores the Mass we'll take his opinion on Our Lady a bit more seriously."

"I'm not up on the content of the Orloo apparitions," said Joel, to bring her back a few degrees closer to the topic. "Except that she talked about mutants."

"Our Lady told us that Satan sought to destroy God's people by having monsters be born into the human race. I don't mean to offend you by saying _monster_ \-- the same root gives us _monstrance_ , after all. Did you know that mutants were originally called monsters by geneticists? And that genetics itself originated in the Catholic Church, with Mendel?"

Joel nodded mechanically at all of these bits of trivia. Madame DuPont went on, "But God in his mercy brought good out of evil by giving these monsters a conscience, the same one that is in humans. Satan can scrape creations together out of the world God has made, but he cannot give them a soul. Because mutants _do_ have a soul -- you're not demons, we don't believe that. You have the same opportunity for redemption as humans have. You are God's victory over the works of the Devil."

If he had read it in print, Joel might have laughed, but there was something terribly unfunny about Madame DuPont. Again he wished that Paul were here; to be alone with this sort of fanaticism was draining.

Madame was still talking. "I heard you were a seminarian -- have you read about the nephilim and the destroyer angels?"

"I'm not in seminary. I'm just doing a theology degree."

"Ah. The nephilim--"

"I know what the nephilim are."

Patronising smile. "The root of the word _nephil_ refers to abortion and miscarriage. Did you know that mutants started to appear soon after birth control pills became available? They are a modern-day recurrence of the nephilim, the offspring of humans and fallen angels. Our Lady's words at Orloo have been proven by history, she predicted all this. Some Protestants have argued that because you aren't human, you have no share in Christ's salvation. But Our Lady herself has told us that mutants can be saved, but it's of paramount importance for them to consecrate themselves to her Immaculate Heart."

"That's fascinating, I hadn't heard that before," Joel said. He wouldn't be able to fake credulity any longer, so he tried again to get her back onto the subject of Jeanne-Marie. "Do you think you could tell me anything about how Jeanne-Marie's powers first manifested? Or what they are?"

Madame hesitated. "If she hasn't told you, I don't think it's my place to discuss it. It was a traumatic situation for everyone involved."

Hmm. "All right, that makes sense. I'll talk it over with her, then. Is it okay if I grab her stuff?" he said, getting the IGA bags out of his pocket and hoping that the busy sound of rattling plastic would discourage her from lecturing him any more.

It didn't. She let him gather up Jeanne-Marie's books and even the four dresses in the armoire, but continued her sermonette. "The Orloo apparitions are Mary's great gift to mutants, you know, and they happened in Canada -- you have every reason to take them very seriously. Her words have come to pass, and that's the sign of genuine prophecy. And still the post-Conciliar church refuses to acknowledge them, refuses to even discuss them. They can't accept Our Lady's message because they're afraid of its truth, and afraid of the world's derision. We are not. The Roman Pontiff can deny the words of the Blessed Mother all he wants, but he only proves that he's an empty cassock. The media likes him, but so what? He's insubstantial, a puff of dust. Just like them. He sits in the seat but the seat is empty, his place does not know him anymore."

Joel felt sick and sad, and for the first time he felt genuinely sorry for Madame DuPont. The expression in her eyes was -- he thought of labelling it "belief," but it wasn't faith as he knew it. It was, he decided, the expression of someone earnestly lecturing a dog, or a tourist in the metro trying to make a francophone speak English by sheer force of will.

But he wasn't a dog, or someone who simply didn't know the language; he knew it too well, in fact. He could almost understand her.

"Do you know what the consequences are, if mutants refuse to consecrate themselves to Mary's Immaculate Heart?" Madame said, and evidently it wasn't a rhetorical question.

But he didn't know the answer, and also didn't care. "We'll go to hell, I guess?"

"You won't go alone. The consequences will be the same as when the nephilim first infected mankind. The Flood. We will all be destroyed, everyone who's not in the Ark." She raised her eyebrows. "You see? You understand the urgency?"

"Yes, madame. I do."

"Good. I will be praying for Jeanne-Marie, and for you."

"Thanks," said Joel, his ears hot. He didn't say _I'll pray for you too_ because he wasn't sure he could, and he hated it when people threw that sentence around like a weapon. "I really have to go."

* * *

Hodya called that evening. Sometimes they texted during the day, or they'd chat online, but she liked phonecalls better. So did he. "Do you want to get on Skype?" she said. "My hair's good today, we shouldn't waste it."

"Yeah, you might be looking good but I'm a garbage heap right now," Joel said, flat on his back in bed, his laptop sitting open on his stomach. "Send me a selfie, preserve the good hair for posterity. How's exams?"

"Exams are like floating on a heavenly bliss-cloud, I can't believe you even have to ask. How are yours?"

"Not great. Last one's tomorrow. Greek."

"How was Hebrew, did I prep you well enough?"

"I _mamash_ tried." Joel had been good at languages when he was younger, which was why he was bilingual now, but he was bombing at Hebrew even with the advantage of having an Israeli girlfriend. "You were amazing to help me at all, but I might be a lost cause. We'll see what my mark is."

"You sound really tired."

"It was a long day, yeah." His Gmail tab said **(1)** so he clicked over. Hodya had sent him a selfie as promised, with all her curly brown hair pushed in front of her face and her glasses perched on top of the mess, like Cousin Itt. "Oh, that's nice, you're right."

"Yeah, you like that? See what you're missing."

"I have such a boner right now."

"You better." She sounded like she was in bed too, a faint rustling and squeaking on her end as she moved. "Are you even allowed to say that? Am I an evil Jewess Medusa corrupting such an innocent Catholic boy?"

"Of course not. I dunno, maybe ideally I'd be too refined to make boner jokes, but that's not your problem."

He hadn't told Hodya that he was giving any kind of serious thought to the idea of joining the Dominicans. And Paul was right: if it was serious, then Joel owed her an answer. Maybe she was trying to gently introduce the topic now, but he was too tired to address it tonight. It would be a waste, anyway, to tell her about the Dominicans and then just get rejected whenever he finally asked to put his application in. Friar Tom had been hinting that Joel should prepare for something like that. To tell Hodya and then have to confess he'd been rejected would be far too humiliating.

He clicked on the lamp and held up the phone to take a selfie himself, making no attempt to look good for the camera, just an exaggerated rictus.

It made her laugh. "Babe, you look horrible, go to bed."

"I was nice about yours."

"I'm being nice too. It's called showing concern. Seriously, get some sleep, okay?"

He gave in. "Okay. That sounds really good right now, actually."

"Love you."

"I love you too."

She'd had to push him at first to say it -- not that he didn't feel that way, but just because he was used to only saying _I love you_ to his family in emergency situations. They didn't say it at the end of every phone conversation, or on birthdays, or at Christmas, or...well, at all. Joel didn't think of his family as being cold, but they didn't verbalise their love much. _Okay, that's fine for you, but I need to hear it out loud,_ Hodya had told him, at the end of a long fight. _I want to hear it and I want to say it._

And once he started, it wasn't hard to get used to it after all. He'd learned.

His phone gone dark, Joel lay still on the bed, heavy and motionless like a grounded boat at low tide. He heard Paul on the stairs, the creak of the floorboards under his feet. The snow outside hit the screens with a steady thucking, a sound he'd always loved.

Paul came in, felt the draught at the window with his hand, and turned on the space heater. He sat down on the end of Joel's bed. "You look really worn out."

The word in French, _tanné_ , had a sense of being used up and fed up, weather-beaten, sick of everything. Joel let his eyes close. "Yeah."

"Talk to Hodya?"

"A little." He knew what Paul meant. "Not really."

"You going to?"

"Eventually."

Paul shifted his weight a little on the bed, and Joel opened his eyes. He was a sickly burnt orange veined with green. "Listen, man, you need to go back to the doctor."

"Paul..."

"I mean it. We have a deal, you know that. You tell me when I'm losing it and I tell you when you are. You're losing it."

Joel rolled over on his side. The familiar topography of the bedside table, the desert dunes of Kleenex and the cliffs of the two books he still hadn't read. Every evening he picked them up, intending to get started, but couldn't concentrate. "I'm not that bad."

"Not yet. That's why you need to go to the doctor now."

"What exactly is a doctor going to do for me? What's Dr. Stein been able to do?"

"What did Dr. Xavier do for you? What did Father Gilles do for you?"

"I'm not sick like that anymore." Those endless days of lying in the whiteness of the Aphanes seemed impossibly idyllic, now. To be sick enough to relax, sick enough that getting up and working was simply impossible -- it would be a relief to be worse than he was.

Paul flopped back on the bed, lying perpendicular to Joel's feet. He switched to English. "Please, please, please, please go see a doctor. Okay? That can be my Christmas present, forget the caviar. You're stressed out and pissy and spacey and you're having seizures again. You're not eating. This does not need to be a big complicated debate."

"Fine, okay, I'm not doing so good. That doesn't magically give doctors a new pill to fix me with. And I don't have time to get back into therapy. Hell, I should be memorising Greek vocab right now."

A long pause. Joel heard Paul inhale deeply, as he did when reading people. At last he sat up, propping himself on one elbow, and said, "So why don't you talk to Friar Tom about it?"

"Because he's a vocations director, not a therapist."

"So? You know him pretty well. He's trained in that kind of thing. I'm sure he's noticed you're off your game -- you haven't been the same since, shit, since April. Why don't you talk to him?"

"It's really annoying when you ask questions you know the answers to, Paul."

"I don't know, I'm just guessing. Does this mean I'm right? You don't want to tell him because you don't want it going on your psychiatric report? You're avoiding therapy because you want to be on paper as completely in remission, is that it? Am I getting warmer?"

"All right, yeah, I'm stupid, I know."

Paul sighed. "Well, right now you kind of are. Are you kidding me with this? Did it occur to you that there are good reasons for a religious order to reject loonies like us? You don't see me trying to be an air traffic controller or anything."

"Look, I'm not a goddamn mental patient anymore," Joel said, beginning to get pissed off. "I know you hate the fact that I'm trying to figure stuff out with the Dominicans. I know Hodya hates it, and I even know that _the Dominicans hate it too_. I know it sounds stupid to everybody else, but the whole experiment's almost over, so why don't you just ride it out?"

"See, that's what I'm talking about. That's the old Joel, that's vintage high school shit. You want to know the truth?" said Paul. The burnt orange had darkened to a dangerous dark purple, spiked with yellow and indigo. He looked alien, and angry. "I don't even know if I should hate it or not, because you barely talk about it with me. Every time I bring it up you put me off."

"Yeah, I can't imagine why."

"Can you at least give me a chance to fuck it up, instead of just assuming I will?" Paul stopped and shook his head. "Look. Look. I'm your best friend -- friend doesn't cover it -- and I'm telling you this _parce que je t'aime -- bien--_ "

 _Je t'aime_ meant _I love you_ , but _je t'aime bien_ meant only _I like you._ It was meant to be ambiguous, the _bien_ relieving the weight of the previous words, but Paul's voice caught in between and the meaning came out knottier and softer than mere liking, a mass of veins intertwined. _Amo amas amat._ Joel remembered sounding Paul out about it once, as obliquely as he could, and Paul had said only, "I never had a brother." And neither had Joel. It made nothing clearer, and they didn't want it to be clear. Or maybe there was too much clarity, the sun shining between two signal mirrors, and Joel wanted darkness, nothing so sharp and burning.

But Paul's words tore past like a cannonball through the hull, and in his desperation to stop the water from rushing in Joel agreed. "Okay, okay, Jesus, I'll go to the doctor." Then: "Sorry."

"Good. It's okay." Paul swallowed, fading to a nervous blue. The snow thucked against the screen. "How did it go in Deux Montagnes?"

Joel didn't think he had the energy to explain all the weirdness, but he provided a few highlights. "I don't know why she even told me all that stuff about Mary and the Devil...you'd think they'd keep it quiet, like they keep some things quiet in the SSPX. It was cringey, I was embarrassed for her."

Paul didn't have much interest in that stuff. "Did you find out about Jeanne-Marie's manifestation?"

"Not as such, I guess," said Joel, throwing his balled-up socks at the laundry hamper. "She said it was traumatic, and that I should ask Jeanne-Marie."

Paul groaned. "I don't know why I bother telling you anything."

"I got distracted."

_"Ayoye."_

They had a curtain to divide the room, an early gesture towards modesty and privacy, but they never actually pulled it shut anymore. Joel didn't even shut the bathroom door behind him; he was always a little worried about seizing in the shower. 

As he unbuttoned his shirt, he watched himself in the mirror, detached and critical. There were the neat white razor scars, long ones starting at the inner elbow and snaking down his forearms to his wrists. He barely thought about those anymore, but nosy people asked about them sometimes. The messier septicaemia scars spread across his chest and back, looking like crumpled paper balls that had been smoothed out again on a tabletop, lumpy tissue under the skin in the places where the poisoned blood had collected, the backs of his shoulders and arms and thighs. He was missing toes on both feet, two on the left and three on the right -- he was lucky to have all his fingers. When he was a teenager he'd never listened very much to the doctors' suggestions about minimising the scars; in those days he used to think _for what? For who?_ Now he wondered if there was something he could do about them -- surgery? Lasers? It seemed like the kind of thing lasers did.

In the bedroom, Paul sniffed once, an ordinary sort of winter sniffle. "I think I'm getting the flu. That flu shot is worthless."

_"J't'aime aussi, Paul."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Norval Morrisseau's _Man Changing Into Thunderbird_ can be seen [here](http://www.morrisseauprints.com/manchanges.html). And you really can have it as a [coffee mug](http://www.shopngc.ca/boutique/en/mugs-en/coffee-mugs-indigenous-art/iman-changes-into-thunderbird-i-mug.html), thanks to the National Gallery.


	3. Legal Age Life at Dépanneur

_I think of you and the beat people and the ones with nothing_  
_and the poor in virtue, the very poor, the ones no one can_  
_respect. I am not worthy to say I love all of you. Intercede for me,_  
_a stuffed shirt in a place of stuffed shirts and a big dumb phony,_  
_who has tried to be respectable and has succeeded. What a deception!_  
_... I am worried about all this, but I am not beating myself over_  
_the head. I just think that, for the love of God, I should say it,_  
_and that, for the love of God, you should pray for me._  
—Thomas Merton, "A Prayer to Dorothy Day"

Joel wrote his Greek exam alone in an empty basement classroom, a proctor barely awake in one corner. During his first term at L'Institut Pastorale, he hadn't bothered to ask for special disability accommodations, and he felt guilty doing it now. He'd needed the extra time last year, when his absence seizures had been out of control, but now Joel thought he was fit to write an ordinary exam. Or he should have been. As Paul had said, he was a little off his game, but that wasn't the administration's fault. The flesh was willing but the spirit was weak.

He checked his translations again, willing his eyes to see the mistakes. Nothing. The text from the synoptic gospels was arranged in parallel columns to show the similarities, and when read straight across the repetitions were rhythmic, hypnotic. _...Where his mother-in-law was lying ill with a fever, a fever, a high fever..._ Joel imagined a little "No Sale" tag popping up with a ding. Everyone had his limits. _Let's call this done._

The proctor took his exam booklet, and Joel trudged upstairs.

At the doors he stopped, and checked his watch. Friar Tom might be in his office, or he might not be. Ordinarily Joel would have been reluctant to barge in without an appointment, but Paul...Paul always got to him. Paul was reluctant to leave the house alone, but before his mutation had manifested he'd been anything but shy, and he was easily frustrated by Joel's reticence. _Ask this stranger about this other stranger's personal problems! Have an uncomfortable conversation with your long-distance girlfriend! Go find Friar Tom and get him to give you therapy for free!_

Joel did need that kind of cattle-prod zapping, and he usually gave in. This time he decided he was pretty sure that Friar Tom wouldn't be in, so he could go up to the office and slip a note under the door. That ought to pacify Paul a little, and buy Joel some time.

In the hallway upstairs by the vocation director's office, Joel started to write a note, balancing his clipboard on one knee. The doors were all closed and the lights were off across the way in the department office, and Joel thought he was safe, but then the door opened and Friar Tom emerged.

"Morning -- did you want to talk to me?"

Joel froze. _Shit._ "Uh...are you leaving?"

"I was on my way out, but I have time. No, definitely come in. You look like you need to talk." Friar Tom looked like Mr. Dressup, bald with big glasses and an off-centre smile. Grandfatherly. Joel had never known his own grandparents, both sets of them dead before he was born. "Let me get some tea from the kitchen. You want any?"

"Sure." Joel went into Friar Tom's office and sat down, trying to regulate his breathing as Dr. Xavier had taught him to do. He felt like disappearing, more than he had in years. _Relax. R-e-l-a-x. Nothing's wrong._

Friar Tom returned with two mugs of tea, the bags floating in clear water. He ran a hand over the thinning grey hair on top of his head and sat down in the opposite chair, the vinyl cushion hissing as air escaped. "So. What can I do for you?"

"I just wanted to come in and ask about...where things are going." Joel wished he could sound more articulate when first attacking a subject. "Like if maybe we could talk about an application process yet or not."

"Sure, we can talk about it. You don't mean you want to start it now?"

"I don't mean that. Not yet. I just, I want to know if -- if it's looking good, you know? You said three months ago that you didn't think it was time." Don't sound impatient. Don't sound desperate. Don't sound crazy, above all.

"Was it three months ago?" Friar Tom leaned over to look at the big four-month calendar on the wall. "October-November-December -- wow. That went by fast. You're right, we owe you some sort of response. Do you want to first fill me in on how things are going for you lately?"

"I'm okay. Exams are done."

"How's business at the house?"

"It's okay, we got the thing with the water heater straightened out. Finally. We had a couple of girls move out -- they got their own apartment in St-Henri. One new girl."

"So everything's under control there? Good. And how's your health?"

Joel felt himself flush. "Why?"

Friar Tom raised his eyebrows. "Better I don't ask? Classified information?"

"Sorry."

"Don't apologise. Is health a touchy subject right now?"

"Sort of." Joel warmed his hands with the tea mug; the offices were always cold. "Seizures are back."

"Yeah. You don't look well. What's the doctor say?"

"I talked to her super quick on the phone this morning, and I see her in a couple of days," Joel said, his gaze drifting over past Friar Tom's shoulder to look at the print on the wall behind him. It was the old Baroque painting of Mary that was known as _Untier of Knots_ , showing the Virgin looking down with a frown of concentration at a long length of knotted white ribbon. Untying the knots, while angels fed her more and more knots to work on. Joel lost his train of thought. "Um..."

"You're seeing the doctor," Friar Tom prompted gently.

"Right, sorry. I'm seeing her but I don't think she'll be able to do anything. I feel like I've tried every drug on the market."

"Well, keep us posted. I hope you feel better over the holidays. Relax a little. You look like you're facing a firing squad whenever I see you -- or do you just get nervous?"

"Nervous, I guess." This was a mistake. Joel looked down at the salt stains on his boots. This was his life, and it was always going to be his life: sitting in a small office with a well-meaning professional and trying to account for why he was so deficient. Probably when he died it would be exactly the same way, sitting there in God's office and looking at God's diplomas and spider plants.

Friar Tom sighed. "All right. Well. I've been taking it slow because I know you have a lot on your plate already. Slow is fine. You're very young. So you asked about whether we should talk about the application process, and I'll give you my opinion as things stand right now, but it's not a final verdict. Remember that."

Joel waited. The room was on the dark north side of the building, with formidable dark bookshelves lining the walls. The dimness reminded him of the quiet rooms at St Rita's. Joel drank the tea, just for something to do with his hands.

"I can't give my recommendation at the moment, Joel. I'm sorry."

The words seemed strangely unimportant, as if they didn't quite count, as if he could just step backward in the conversation and get a better result. _Ctrl-Z this whole morning._

"You have a vocation, a calling in life, just like everybody else in the world does. And you have considerable gifts, some of which are very rare, but they don't leap out and shout 'Dominican!' at me. I'm not sure you would do well in our sort of life."

Joel drank some more of the scalding tea, because his mouth was too dry to talk.

"It's not a rejection. I want to be very sure you understand that." Friar Tom lifted his shoulders, his elbows resting on his desk. "Maybe I'm wrong, maybe things will be clearer in a few months. And don't feel like you've wasted the last few years, either -- a lot of guys feel like that."

"Right."

"So what do you think? I find you hard to read sometimes."

Joel swallowed, and waited until he thought he could sound normal. "What was the -- what were the, uh, deciding factors here?"

"There's no decision yet. It's an ad hoc judgement, because you asked me what I thought. However..." Friar Tom took a deep breath, glancing outside at the bare tree branches. "You don't seem to have clicked with your spiritual director. That's not a deal-breaker, but until you have a relationship with someone it's going to be hard for me to give a recommendation to start the application process. The other major consideration is stability. You come off as very -- we look for a certain resilience. We don't want you to join us and then have to leave, completely burned out. And then, I may be wrong about this, but I get a vibe from you that says you're doing this out of duty, not because you're happy about it."

"Okay."

"Am I right about that? Give me some direction, here."

Joel thought he finally had enough words gathered up for an insight, if he could force the words out. "I don't remember if I talked about this at our other meetings, but I wanted to be part of this because -- because--"

"Because why?"

He tried, but couldn't squeeze that sentence through all the way to the end. He changed tacks. "Do you know Father Mike O'Brien? From the Oblates in Ottawa?"

"Mike, sure. I met him down at the benefit for Waupoos last summer."

"He's my uncle. I've got a bunch of priests and religious in my family."

Friar Tom nodded. "So you were kind of predisposed to think of this as a possible path for yourself, you're saying? You'd seen it in action before?"

"Yeah, but also like..." Joel paused for a long time. Finally he said, "It's something that already exists. I don't have to build it. And I wouldn't be the only one."

"Aha." Friar Tom sat back and nodded. "You're feeling a little isolated there at the house?"

"Yeah. No. Everyone at the house is great, they're amazing. But they do kind of...I feel like I'm the only one there who cares about the religious stuff. Even Paul, he'll go to Mass with me and things like that but he's doing it _for_ me. And that's -- I don't even deserve someone who cares that much, but I just--" It was getting hard to speak; his throat tended to close up when he was upset, and sometimes his voice would be just a low scraping, barely audible. "I want to stop feeling like the biggest thing in my life is such a fucking mystery to the people I love most. And I thought it would just...translate...better if I could call it a vocation."

Friar Tom looked at him for what felt like a long time, chair squeaking as he rocked a little, head propped on his right hand. At last he said, quietly, "Yeah."

"Yeah."

"You know, counselling guys like you who are very closed-mouthed, it's like looking for a stud in the wall with one of those electronic thingies from Canadian Tire. I've been hunting for it all these months and then we get onto this topic and the little red light starts blinking like crazy. Bing!" He smiled, but then grew serious again. "Well, has it worked like you thought it would? People ask what your story is, you tell them you're discerning with the Dominicans, and they understand something important about you? Does it translate?"

It didn't. That was the worst part, the most humiliating thing. Joel shook his head.

"We've only had a few talks together, Joel, so I can't say that I know you very well. But the impression I get is that you've got a lot going on inside, and you share a tiny fraction of that with other people, and the rest just stays inside under pressure. Like a can of spray paint. Maybe that's why you gravitated to the Dominicans, the Order of Preachers -- wanting to release all that stuff inside. Maybe? No? Okay, I'm guessing, I admit it," said Friar Tom with another fleeting smile. "What I want to say here is that I understand the logic behind the choice, insofar as you've explained it. But I also think that you're not going to get your needs met this way, and the added pressures of religious life would be unhealthy for you."

"Right." Stupid, stupid. Seven months of his life down the drain. Never mind the years he had left of painfully plugging through that theology degree, which was still only half done. Not to mention all that time he'd spent working up the courage to ask about vocations in the first place. "Yeah, that's all...I mean, you're not wrong. I'm totally like that."

He must have been delusional. It was only too clear now, the difference between himself and those bright-faced kind boys who were headed for the novitiate, who seemed so buoyant, so _resilient._ Jesus, why had he thought he could be like that? Why hadn't someone told him, why did they let him make a fool of himself?

"I should try to set you up with another spiritual director. Not as a vocations thing, but just to help you on the Way, you know? You might have better luck with someone else. Some people you just don't click with."

"Can I--" Joel had to stop, feeling his throat block up completely. Goddammit. Even a speck of dignity was too much to ask, it seemed. "Can I leave?"

Friar Tom spread his hands. "Anytime."

"I mean, can I leave school? I don't...I just don't. Right now. I can't."

Friar Tom looked down at the desktop. "Taking next term off doesn't sound like a bad idea. It sounds like you're busy and you're sick, and school's not your top priority right now. Makes sense to me. But you should take a week or so to think about it before you talk to an advisor. You're shook up right now."

"I'm not. I was expecting this."

"But it's different when you hear it for real," said Friar Tom softly. "Isn't it? I'm so sorry."

"No. You're right. I can't, I can't even go to school, and there's no way I could do anything tougher than that. That's reasonable."

"Joel, it's not so much that religious life is _tougher_ than school. This isn't the army. It's that -- it's a moulding process, you know? The clay has to be at the right consistency before we can mould. Not too hard, not too soft, not too dry, not too wet. Unhappy people don't take the moulding well. We'd make you worse. When I was in this part of the process, many moons ago, 'happy' was a bit of a dirty word. You weren't supposed to sound like you wanted a cushy life, like you were afraid of a bit of suffering. And there's truth to that, because it isn't easy. Still. We're not trying to crush anybody. I'm afraid you'd get crushed if you joined the novitiate as you are now."

"Uh-huh." He knew Friar Tom hated responses like that, but he couldn't think of anything else to say. Zombie mode.

"I wish I could make you feel the hope I feel for you. It's clear to me that you hear God's call, that you're listening and trying to find out what you're supposed to be doing, and I know God is pleased by that. What I think you should consider is that maybe you're already doing what he wants of you. Because that's the other major factor that makes me think religious life isn't right for you -- you're doing some vital work at that house, and I don't think you're replaceable there. Maybe you're already living your vocation." Friar Tom smiled. "Listen, what are you doing, after you get out of here?"

"I've got some work to do at home." Really he should talk to Jeanne-Marie, even though she couldn't seem to talk to him for more than ten minutes without looking like she wanted to pepper spray him.

"Why don't you go out to lunch instead? See a friend, go take in a matinee? I'm really concerned, you know. You look terrible."

"That's what they tell me." Joel forced a smile and picked up his backpack. "I'll be all right, somehow. I think. I've got to go."

"Hold up, hold on there," said Friar Tom, waving his hand. He got up and stood before Joel in the doorway. "In the name of the Father..."

Joel crossed himself and Friar Tom rested one hand on his head, heavy and warm. Too intimate, uncomfortable even though it was kindly-meant. "Holy Father, we ask you to bless and keep this young man, your servant and your beloved son. May your deep peace come to him as he lives out his destiny, your purpose. Amen."

The tears started leaking out as Joel walked back down the hall towards the elevator. In the gunmetal grey paint above the buttons, someone had scratched GO HABS GO. He wiped his face on his sleeve, and saw his image in the mirrored back of the elevator booth. Tall, drooping at the shoulders, his father's profile always in the corner of his eye.

He ran a hand through his hair and when the doors opened, walked out through the building to the parking lot. The sun was shining on the ice-hardened snow, the cold air brilliant and bright, clouds of white vapour blowing from the mouths of passing students. A crowd of sparrows was gathered in the brown branches of the shrubs by the door, and Joel went invisible as he passed so that he wouldn't alarm them. He could still hear them peeping to each other.

* * *

No one had ever told Jean-Paul that he _couldn't_ let his friends sleep in the dépanneur. In fact, back when Jean-Paul was first hired the boss said, "So long as you keep the customers moving and don't damage the merchandise, you can do what you like on the night shift." Jean-Paul did keep the customers moving. He also mopped up after their muddy boots and even rearranged the magazines if they got out of order, because why bother with a job if you weren't going to do it well? It wasn't about money, his pay that barely covered his metro pass every month. It was about being independent, earning your own place in the world, however slowly.

His parents didn't like him working a night shift, but they were the ones who had told him that he should do something with his time now that he was off the track team. It was a Friday night and he was scrubbing a microwave for minimum wage—they should count their blessings, he thought.

At first it was only Mathieu who hung around in the early evening, but later Mathieu started to bring Julien Zikakis with him. Julien had been in math with Mathieu and Jean-Paul until his mutant thing came out.

Jean-Paul felt sorry for Zikakis, or "Zizi" as the kids at school used to call him, and didn't mind letting the guy sleep in the broom closet, but he drew the line at free food. Mathieu would always buy bags of chips and eat two before offering the rest of the bag to Zizi. "I just wanted a taste. Coach wouldn't want me stuffing myself anyway."

But things were starting to get out of hand now. Zizi regularly came in with two or three other mutant kids in tow, like Mars and Prawn. They bought coffees from the machines with big handfuls of change and nursed them for half the night, leaning against the counter and wasting time. Mars was a pretty Haitian girl who kept a low profile, taking naps in the ladies' room -- at least she wasn't getting high in there, or if she did Jean-Paul never caught her at it. Zizi continued to sack out in the broom closet, and once Jean-Paul thought he heard the distinctive sounds of jerking off, but on the whole he behaved himself. Mathieu stopped showing up after awhile, citing track as an excuse. He must have known that it galled Jean-Paul to be thrown off the team, especially when no one had been able to prove the steroid charge, but...well, they weren't hanging around together much anymore.

Prawn was by far the most annoying. His nickname didn't have anything to do with his power, or indeed with anything else; he didn't even seem to remember where it had originally come from. His mutation was apparently pretty dangerous, according to Mars. _Prawn could flash-fry the city if he wanted to_ , she'd said, but it was hard to take him very seriously as a threat. He was a lanky kid with long, shaggy blond hair like a pony's, and under the hair his face was nosey and narrow, also horse-like. He was British, spoke no French, and wouldn't admit to understanding any either. (Prawn had been in Montreal for over a year, and Jean-Paul figured he had to know more than he let on.) He spent his time in the dépanneur reading the magazines and newspapers (the English ones), putting them back out of order, and offering unsolicited opinions.

"How d'you like this one? 'The Canadian Association for Natural Motherhood is protesting vaccination requirements in schools, calling the measures "pro-mutant propaganda,"'" Prawn read aloud from an English newspaper, sitting on the floor next to the newsstand rack. "This stupid bint thinks vaccines cause mutation, so she's got one count of being dumb in the tits. But she also thinks the province is so pro-mutant that they want to make more of us, which is strike two. Twice as dumb in the tits."

Jean-Paul was in the middle of picking cheese out of the microwave door-grille. "You say that like you want me to do something about it."

"No, I just think this country is full of fucking brainless twats who get hysterical about mutants, and I felt like saying so."

"Why, is there some country that isn't? Can I book you a plane ticket?" Jean-Paul took a break from the cheese-picking to wash his hands. Microwave duty was so gross that he couldn't do too much of it at a time without feeling like he was going to gag. 

"And can you get through a sentence without saying _cunt-bitch-bint-twat-tits_?" said Mars from her corner. "Stop being a misogynistic prick."

"I'm not a misogynist. Why's it misogynist to say twat but it's fine to say prick, anyway?"

"I'm not your coach for Human Decency 101, Prawn."

"Don't you want to help me take the piss out of this anti-vaxxer? Can't that bring us together?"

Jean-Paul rinsed his J-cloth out in the sink, trying not to touch the bits of cheese and tomato sauce that clung to it. "Shooting fish in a barrel, isn't it?"

"Well, yes," Prawn admitted, spreading the rest of the newspaper out on the floor. "But I'm bored. Tell you something, mate, you ought to tell management to put in some chairs here. Maybe a table or two."

Jean-Paul went to the cash to ring up the sale for the newspaper, deciding it was easier to lose a dollar than to make Prawn leave the newsstand alone. "You know, we have a wonderful chain here in Canada called Tim Horton's. I think they have what you're looking for."

"Eh, but I don't know anyone who works at a Timmy's. I get the bum's rush after fifteen minutes."

"I can't imagine why. It must be anti-mutant prejudice."

Prawn gave him the finger, and was quiet for awhile. Jean-Paul, daring to hope for half an hour to himself, got out his history textbook to study. The Americans of the Fenian Brotherhood were marching on Montreal, hoping to create a diversion for their compatriots in Ireland. Ill-thought three-pronged invasions. There was a lame activity section about Alexander Muir, some racist Canadian Orangeman who'd fought against the Fenians and then later wrote "The Maple Leaf Forever", a seriously problematic national song that neatly ignored everyone in the country who wasn't English, Irish, or Scottish. Jean-Paul was supposed to listen to the scratchy original recording and then write a reflection piece on the several proposed "less offensive" versions of the lyrics. _Which one do you feel is most appropriate and why?_

After a while, Jean-Paul looked up and saw that Prawn was leaning back against the cupboard, sleeping or trying to sleep, his long legs propped up against the Vachon display. Jean-Paul went to his school's website on his phone, found the mp3 link for "The Maple Leaf Forever", and turned the volume up as loud as it would go.

A burst of static, some crackling strings, and a wobbly baritone: _"Eeen days of yooore, from Brrrritain's shore, Wolfe the dauntless he-ro came..."_

It was just as rewarding as he'd hoped: Prawn spasmed violently awake, nearly kicking over the Vachon snack-cake rack, his arms windmilling as he fumbled on either side, looking for a button somewhere to turn off the noise. When he came back to himself enough to relax he picked up one of the individually-wrapped cakes and threw it at Jean-Paul. "Get to fuck, mate, that's not fucking funny--"

"No, it's _real_ funny," Mars said, completely losing it. "You looked like you were being electrocuted--"

"And don't toss these around, okay?" Jean-Paul scolded him, picking up the Jos. Louis cake and putting it back on the rack. "The one thing I'm not supposed to do is damage the merchandise."

"I was tired, you utter cock. May I please get some sleep in peace and quiet, your majesty? Is that allowed? Christ, you hate it when I'm bothering you and you hate it when I settle down, what am I supposed to do?"

"Oh, relax," said Jean-Paul, turning off the music. "The opportunity was there and I couldn't resist, that's all. Go back to sleep."

But with the music turned off, they could hear some commotion outside. A few scattered yells at first, and then the usual sounds of traffic on Avenue Victoria dissolved into sirens and horn honking. Cops on megaphones, a muffled voice screaming. Jean-Paul came around the counter and went to the door to see what was going on.

On the corner, three cop cars had converged on something or someone, lights whirling, and the officers were slamming doors and climbing out with guns drawn. Jean-Paul opened the door to get a better view. Someone was screaming desperately in English. _"Leave me alone! Leave me the fuck alone!"_

Prawn was up and watching too. "Mutant."

"How do you know?"

Prawn nodded vaguely at some point in the air, as if there was something there that was visible to him but not the others. "That's what the cops are saying on the radio. I'd jam their signal, but I don't think it'd help the kid. He's going to safety. If he doesn't..."

He trailed off and stared at nothing for a few seconds, brow furrowed, and then suddenly the colour drained from his face. "Oh no," he said softly. "No, that's bad, that's going to be -- that's _really_ bad..."

One of the cops started to yell, voice squeaking, incoherent swearing: _"Câlisse de crisse--"_

Prawn's knee buckled as though someone had kicked him off-balance, and he stumbled against the front window of the dep. "Jesus Christ, get out, get out, get them all out--"

Mars was closest at hand, and Prawn grabbed her to push her out the door. "Get your hands off me, dipshit. What's going on?"

"Fucking run, as far from that kid as you can get. Head for the park. JP, get Zizi. I'm going to try to..."

He went quiet, concentrating, and the store speakers let out a weird feedback whine and a crash of static. The noise increased, until it was a Niagara Falls roar, and in the midst of the sound Jean-Paul could make out a rhythmic beeping. Short-short-short long-long-long short-short-short. S.O.S. The ground was trembling under their feet. The box of straws fell off the countertop and sprayed over the floor, with the beef jerky and the Swedish berries soon following. Jean-Paul and Zizi nearly fell as they made for the exit.

Prawn remained by the front window, brow furrowed, and suddenly there was a loud pop from the speakers and the noise stopped. "Shit."

"Come on." They ran. Jean-Paul felt faintly ridiculous; the ground was rumbling, but other than that nothing seemed to be happening.

Then something happened.

 _The land will spit them out_ , Jean-Paul thought. It was from the Bible, he thought, misremembered, but it was all he could think of now as Avenue Victoria reared up and shook itself in waves, like a sheet when you snap it open over the bed. Except pieces of asphalt were flying and two of the cop cars were overturned now, rolling over like scattered toys.

Montreal got earthquakes sometimes; there was a faultline somewhere up in the Gatineau hills, and every so often they got a little tremor. Jean-Paul remembered once that his father had called him upstairs from the basement rec room. "Feel that?" his father had said, smiling. The fridge had been jittering from side to side. But those little tremors never did any damage.

This was different. Water was bursting up from somewhere -- a broken hydrant, maybe? -- rushing through the street. Mars was sprinting ahead of them, weaving through the crowd, headed for the park. For a moment Jean-Paul thought that Prawn might have jumped the gun. Sure, the mutants didn't want to be in the area when there were cops everywhere, but shouldn't Jean-Paul stay close by the dep so that he could tell his boss what happened? The ground was done shaking--

Then felt heat on the back of his neck and heard the soft sucking noise of a very large fire catching very suddenly. He turned for a second to look back at it and saw a huge golden blossom of fire in the street, a ball of flame above the rushing water. The air stank of rotten eggs. Gas leak.

No, Prawn had been right. 

Jean-Paul ran, ran as he'd never run before, not even on the track team. It was more like flying than like running, without the relentless thudding of his feet on the pavement, without the accompanying beat of his heart. The street was crowded with cops, EMTs, firefighters, and useless rubberneckers, but they were all moving so incredibly slowly. It was as easy to move around them as it was to walk through the woods without hitting trees. He couldn't feel the ground. He only felt wind, only saw the darkness lined with orange sodium lamps. The noise and heat of the explosion faded, as if someone were turning down the sound on a television, and he stopped, halfway through the park. Mars was there, looking windblown and confused. "What the fuck?" she kept saying, in English. "What the fuck?"

Prawn and Zizi were far behind, but still on their feet. Jean-Paul wasn't even out of breath. Something wasn't right. "Was -- was I -- what happened?"

"I don't fucking know. Dude." She was breathless and excited, and she pushed him in the chest, an Elaine Benes _get out_ push. "Are you kidding me with this? You're a goddamn speedster -- why didn't you tell us you were a mutant?"

"I'm not. I didn't know." So the coach hadn't been too far wrong when he'd accused Jean-Paul of using steroids. He really had been cheating, somehow, without knowing it. All this time he'd been thinking to himself _I'm just really good, and they're jealous._ How vain, and how stupid. "I mean...no, I didn't know. Maybe I thought something was up, but..."

Mars let go of him and smiled. "First time?"

"Yeah. It was never like that before. Not at all."

"Well, welcome to the club, man. _One of us, one of us_ \--" She broke off the chant to climb up on a transformer box, looking for a better view. "Prawn, I swear to God, if you don't hurry up--"

From the corner of the park, Jean-Paul could just see the fire and the water. The buildings were still standing, windows blown out, flames licking against the dark sky. The street was torn to pieces, the overturned cop cars looked almost _melted_ , and there was a sulphurous stink in the air from the exposed and broken pipes. Jean-Paul realised he was cold; he'd run out without his coat. Prawn and Zizi reached the bench at the edge of the park and collapsed.

"Is the kid still alive?" Jean-Paul asked. "What happened?"

"Two-fifty-five. Massive damage all over Victoria Avenue below St-Kevin. No word from officers on the scene." Prawn opened his eyes. "I hope you've got your phone?"

"Yeah." Jean-Paul checked the time before handing it to Prawn. Only a little after nine. The street was already filling with people, and the paramedics were waving their arms.

Prawn pressed in a number and waited. Then, sounding absurdly calm, he said, "I reckon you're at home, then? Chinatown? Paul with you? We're around Coronation Elementary School, you know where that is? Right, by Plamondon, but don't take the metro, it'll be stopped. What? Oh, a gas main exploded, that's all. Cops were hassling a kid with seismic powers, absolutely brilliant. No, we're great. We'll see you, then."

Another cop car was approaching, presumably part of back-up, but it stopped in front of the school and two officers got out. "You kids were at the scene of the explosion?"

"No," said Mars, as if it were a reflex. "We just got here. What's going on down there?"

The other cop was practically vibrating with tension, and he said, "Don't fuck with us, freaks. Your descriptions were all over the radio. Let's see CRIM cards."

Prawn, Mars, and Zizi each dug around in their pockets and handed over ID. The shorter cop turned the cards over, shining his flashlight on them, and finally nodded. He turned to Jean-Paul. "What about you?"

"I'm not a mutant," said Jean-Paul, but his voice lacked conviction. He would have sounded just as phony if he had said he was a mutant -- that fact was hanging in some indeterminate region between truth and falsehood, and hadn't yet settled on one side or the other. He just needed some time to get his head together.

The cop glared at him. "Yeah, bullshit. You're going to safety."

"You can't take him to safety without proof he's a mutant," said Mars, sounding a little too scornful for her own good. "That's the law."

"Oh, listen to the legal beagle. We're taking you and your boyfriends in for questioning, Miss Kernizant, and your little buddy is coming along for the same reason. He gets a free government-sponsored DNA test at safety, and if we find out he's telling the truth, he goes to lockup with our sincerest apologies."

"Sounds fair to me," said the other cop.

The handcuffs were heavy and tight. Prawn said they were made of adamantium.

* * *

Paul's thick makeup made him darker than usual -- he couldn't quite replicate the natural colour of his skin with the Dermacolor, and the results looked like a self-tanner mistake. But self-tanner mistakes were ordinary, at least, and he looked normal. Besides, the yellow lights of Fung Shing in Chinatown made everyone look dull and sweaty. The heating system was broken, stuck on full blast, and the door was propped open with a brick to let gusts of cold air blow in from the Main. They were taking Friar Tom's advice, more or less, to celebrate the end of Joel's exams. He liked Chinese food no matter how bad it was, but Paul's tastes were a little more refined and he insisted on a decent place in Chinatown rather than just a greasy buffet somewhere else in the city.

Joel caught sight of a gleam of fuchsia as Paul's sleeve rode up, and kicked him lightly under the table. "Oh my God, you're a mutant."

"Ha ha." Paul adjusted his sleeve. "I like you on these meds. Very mellow. What'd Dr Stein give you?"

"Just upped my Klonopin. She doesn't think it's a long-term solution, but it'll buy us some time, I guess."

Paul scooped the green peppers off Joel's plate of chicken in black bean sauce. "What's next, then?"

"She told me to stay invisible more. Either it holds off the inevitable or it actually raises my seizure threshold, she's not sure. Leave some of those peppers for me, you've got a whole plateful." Paul had trouble digesting meats and always ordered stir fried vegetables, but he liked the black bean dishes. Joel spooned some of the sauce onto Paul's plate. "That'll wait for something longer than a phone consult, though. I see her next week, but I think she'll want to talk about surgery."

"Really, or are you just being gloomy?"

"I've been on the drug merry-go-round for awhile here. I don't think I'm a candidate for cortical resection, at least as I understood the explanation. But the doctor said I do fit the requirements for VNS, so that might help. One time she mentioned someone out in Repentigny who's doing some sort of combo therapy specially aimed at mutants, with modified VNS technology and drugs. I think a relative of Keppra, she said?"

"Oh, Keppra. Keppra's nice. Compared to a lot of them, anyway." Paul had been on a few anticonvulsant drugs for his bipolar disorder, and thus was familiar with the side effect profiles. "You were okay on that one."

"It didn't _help_ , but I tolerated it fine, sure."

There was a lull, and Joel thought about telling Paul what Friar Tom had said. He decided to save it for some other time, some other place. He wanted privacy. It would be hard enough to explain how he felt, how harrowed and hollowed out inside -- but it wasn't bad. He'd thrown up the poison at last.

Paul swirled a pepper in the sauce and continued, his mouth full, "So guess who I talked to today?"

"Who?"

"Guess."

Joel didn't know what might surprise him at this point. "I dunno. Your mother?"

"Nope, still a media blackout from her. Guess again."

"You didn't call that radio show again, did you?"

"I learned my lesson the last time. No, I stole your phone file and called your dad's old friend Lynn Brioux."

Joel actually dropped his fork and had to bend over to get it before the five-second-rule was over. "Lynn _Brioux_ \-- Jesus Christ, Paul, what for?"

"Just poking around. You already sent the report to the Director of Youth Protection, but I wanted to see if I could dig up anything else on the DuPont school." Paul speared a couple of bamboo shoots on his fork. "She does education stuff, so I thought she was a good person to ask."

"She's a Senator, man, she can't do anything about a sketchy private school. You didn't mention me, did you?"

"Of course I did. How else do you think I got to talk to her and not a machine? She said to give you her regards. And she didn't mind talking to me at all, and, _and_ , she knew a lot about dodgy private schools. She gave me some phone numbers."

Joel was rubbing his temple. "I'm trying to imagine this conversation. You ring her up, completely unsolicited, and say what? 'I know this guy who's related to someone you used to work with, and now I'd like to waste your time for half an hour?'"

"See, this is why you still have trouble cold-calling people," Paul said. "You exaggerate the risks and totally overlook the benefits. Some people are _nice_ , you see, and they like to help. And she's a Senator, not a brain surgeon. I know your dad worked hard but most of them fucking don't, and you know it. I'm sure I didn't interrupt anything more strenuous than two o'clock martinis."

Joel sighed. "Right, well, what'd you find out?"

"I googled. They were an approved Catholic private school until the mid '90s, when the crazies moved in, I guess. An abuse investigation in '98, but nothing came of that. The part that the Honourable Lynn Brioux contributed, and this should interest you, is that they were mentioned in her report on mutants in schools five years ago. She emailed me the PDF, it's like two hundred pages."

"You can get those Senate reports out of the library, you know. Don't waste printer ink on it." Joel poured himself some more tea from the tiny metal pot. "I'm surprised Madame DuPont got into Brioux. That's the gold standard for mutant hate-fests in school."

Paul looked smug. "Well, the report says they didn't have that many mutants there. In fact, at the time, they only had one."

"What?"

"That's right. And this unnamed female student, thirteen years of age, was subjected to examinations for demonic possession. Sounding familiar?"

It was hard to be cautious, but Joel tried to reign himself in. "That would only put Jeanne-Marie at eighteen, and she's already teaching primary school? Doesn't sound right."

"You think they care about standards or having educated teachers? You said they had a professed nun there who was younger than us, it sounds like typical right-wing Catholic stuff. Make people take on way too much responsibility when they're too young to know better, then blame them when you get caught being an abusive shithead. Repeat. I think it sounds pretty plausible. This student was attempting suicide when her powers manifested, things were so bad. Bad enough for suicide when you're human, and bad enough for exorcisms when you're a mutant. Wonderful place."

Something was wrong. "Well...wait. Madame DuPont has this crazy suicidal demoniac mutant, and she decides to let her teach children? What's going on there?"

 _"Sais pas."_ Paul gestured for the cheque. "Maybe she got better. Maybe she consecrated her heart to the Immaculate blah blah whatever, and Madame DuPont was convinced. So now what do you think of my detective work?"

"You got lucky. And you could have read the Brioux report on your own."

"But?"

"But this time it worked. Very nice. Are you happy?"

"Thank you."

"Just do things like that by email, in the future. People on the Hill are shirty about their phone time -- I guess you caught her on a good day."

"No, I'm just very charming."

Joel was about to say something, but suddenly all the tables in the restaurant began to shake, silverware tinkling and glass breaking. He could even feel the walls and the roof shake, like when he'd been down East with his family as a kid and felt the big wind off the ocean battering the cottage on the shore. 

"It's not stopping," he said over the noise. "I think we should get out."

Joel tried to gather up his coat, which didn't work because his hands went through it. He'd automatically gone into the Aphanes, and it bothered him that he hadn't noticed that, but now there were loud thuds and metallic groans coming from the kitchen and there just wasn't time. _O my God I am heartily sorry for having offended thee..._ He realised that he couldn't be killed at all, not like this, which seemed strange and almost embarrassingly unfair. Paul picked up Joel's coat for him.

Plaster was falling in tiny flakes from the ceiling. Buildings in Montreal weren't built to withstand serious earthquakes, and nobody here was used to them. People were yelling in French, Chinese, English. Joel hovered protectively around Paul, as if he could do any good, while they pressed in with the crowd streaming out the front door.

"Now, don't push!" an older anglo gentleman was saying loudly, in the authoritative voice of a teacher. "Won't get anywhere if we push!"

The cars on the street outside were spread all over, out of their lanes and askew, and horns were honking everywhere, car alarms going off, phones ringing. Then the electricity blinked out, leaving the city lit only by the stars in the canyons between the buildings. After a moment of dullness, the stars became very bright.

Joel, however, could still see. The world wasn't muffled in white, nor was it dark. For the first time in his life he could _see_ , without light or shadow, without even the constraints of binocular vision. He saw the backs of people's heads and the fronts, at the same time. He saw their bones and the grey brains in their protective layers. The unlit cavities and close-packed organs padded with grainy bits of fat like sofa-filling, all of it moving and shifting as the person walked, coffee sluicing in an empty stomach, hidden growths, skin and hair and tight nylons and day's-end sweat in the corners. He couldn't touch any of it and it couldn't touch him, not really, but it all passed through his awareness and then was gone again before he could process. Before and behind, above and below, within and without.

Maybe he was imagining it all, or hallucinating it. He wasn't sure.

Paul had got out onto the Main and was getting jostled by people as he stared around. Finally he just looked up and yelled, "Joel!"

"I'm here, I'm here." It took a few seconds to get back to his body. He'd been in some expanded state, hanging over the street, and now he felt small, tightly wrapped up in flesh. The all-encompassing vision was gone, and he could see in only one direction. "I'm here, it's okay."

No one even noticed his reappearance. Crowds never picked up on stuff like that. Paul led him around the corner to the car. Joel felt a buzz in his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. "Hello?"

"I reckon you're at home, then?" The phone number was unfamiliar, but Joel recognised the Leeds accent right away.

"No, we're down in Chinatown. Arlette and Grace are at the house, if you need them."

"Chinatown? Paul with you?"

"Yeah." Apparently Arlette and Grace wouldn't do, or maybe Prawn couldn't get to the house. Joel had visions of him lying in an alley somewhere with a broken leg, and tried to stay calm. "Are you all right? Do you need us to come meet you somewhere?"

"We're around Coronation Elementary School, you know where that is?"

That wasn't far from l'Institut Pastorale, so Joel knew the area. "Uh, Côte-des-Neiges, right? Plamondon metro?"

"Right, by Plamondon, but don't take the metro, it'll be stopped."

"We're not taking the metro, Paul's got the car. How bad was the earthquake over there?"

"What?" There were sirens in the background. "Oh, a gas main exploded, that's all. Cops were hassling a kid with seismic powers, absolutely brilliant."

"Jesus Mary and Joseph," Joel said. "Are you all right? Are _they_ all right, the kid? You didn't get hurt?"

"No, we're great. We'll see you, then." He hung up.

Paul raised his eyebrows. _"C'est quoi ce délire?"_

Joel shrugged and put his phone back in his pocket. "We gotta head over to Côte-des-Neiges. Prawn is...I don't know, he needs some help up there."

Paul snorted, bitter. "Maybe we should save time and just go straight to Mile End."

 

In the end, that was what they did, since at Boulevard St-Joseph Joel got a text message saying: _Mile end. Me Mars zizi and this other guy got taken in. Bail?_

 _We'll take care of it but I need the other guy's name now,_ Joel texted back. _I can't walk in and ask for Some Guy._

 _Jean-Paul Martin_ , Prawn replied after a few moments. _Gotta go._

Mile End Safety Centre, on Rue St-Viateur, was a blank concrete building surrounded by a 12-foot concrete fence. A tower on the roof blinked orange and green; the telepaths who'd been inside said it scrambled their signals, which Joel thought was a little suspect -- he didn't think telepathy was understood well enough yet to jam it with technology. But he didn't know what the towers were for, either. Prawn said it was just an ordinary microwave tower, but Mars and Vicky still said their psi powers were scrambled when they were inside—somehow.

A sign on the gate read, **You are now entering property of Corrections Canada. Any persons or vehicles within may be stopped and searched.** Inside, the first checkpoint was manned by four armed male guards, and a female officer sat in the booth behind bulletproof glass and a thick lead screen. At first, Joel had thought it was for anonymity, like the screen in a confessional, and Prawn had said its function was more like the screen in a microwave door -- a Faraday cage.

Her voice crackled through the intercom, a bored, faded voice. "One at a time. State your business, please."

"Standing as bail-guarantors for the release of four detainees."

She switched to English even though he hadn't asked her to. "And are you a mutant under the definition of section—"

"Yes." Joel found his CRIM card in his wallet and dropped it into the sliding metal drawer.

The drawer snapped shut, and the figure behind the screen was still for several long moments. Then: "I'm going to have to ask you to please provide two alternate pieces of photo identification."

This had never happened before, but there was always something new in the process. Joel made a show of going through his wallet, because appearing obedient always greased the wheels, but he asked, "Sorry, what's wrong with my CRIM card?"

"I can't tell if the photo is a likeness, sir," she said mildly.

That was a new one. "Uh, the photo's not that old. I got a haircut since then, is that what's -- can you see me at all from behind there?"

"The whole front lobby is monitored, sir, I can see you very clearly."

"Can you take my word for it on the haircut? I only have my health card and the CRIM."

"Driver's license?"

"I can't drive."

"Passport?"

Joel's patience was waning, but Paul's had clearly run out. "Madame, please, the picture's only a year old. It looks like Joel with shorter hair. We've been here before, a lot, and we always follow the rules. Ask that redheaded guard, I know I saw him here last time."

The armed guards in green, who had been watching with bored amusement, sank back inside themselves and became deadpan again, blank. The redheaded guard said, "We aren't allowed to influence the porter, sir."

"We can go home and get my passport," Joel suggested, checking his watch.

"No, this is ridiculous. Your powers are listed on the CRIM card. If you wanted to sneak in, no one could stop you."

"You're not helping," said Joel.

"All right, sir, at this point I'm going to have to remind you that failing to properly identify yourself at a safety centre checkpoint is an indictable offence under the Public Order Act."

"I did identify myself," Joel snapped. "I'm sorry. Sorry. I know you're doing your job, but..."

"Do you have a student card?" It was a peace offering.

"Yes. Yes, I do." He slid his student card and health card into the drawer. When the drawer opened again, there was a yellow plastic visitor's pass inside. "Thank you."

"Next, please."

When Paul got through, the redheaded guard led them down the blank yellow-lit hallway to the main desk. Paul sat down on the navy couch and opened up a copy of _L'actualité_ magazine that was lying on the table, while Joel got the forms from the woman at the front desk and began to fill them out.

"Those detainees are classified S3," the woman told him. "One person can only stand as guarantor for two S3 detainees at a time. So you can take two of them and your friend can take the other two, provided you're not an S3 guarantor for anyone else."

S3 was high-risk, which was no wonder if they'd been involved in a situation that had broken gas and water mains. Or if the cops had just assumed they were involved in it. That was big trouble even by Prawn's standards, and Joel had never signed out an S3 detainee before. There was no requirement for acquaintance, which meant that Joel could sign the mysterious Jean-Paul Martin out even though they'd never met, but with an S3 designation Joel would be held responsible if the kid got in trouble again within a year.

Joel prayed that Jean-Paul could keep his nose clean, and he signed and dated the agreement, promising Her Majesty that he would be responsible for keeping Jean-Paul Martin out of the law's hair for twelve calendar months.

"You want to sign Prawn out?" Joel asked Paul.

"I'll take Mars and Zizi," he replied, in a tone that clearly said, _I'm not stupid._

"Fine, fine." _Holy Mary Mother of God, I will make a pilgrimage to Mount Carmel next January if you keep Prawn in line for a year, I promise. I'll go anywhere you want._ Joel signed, thus putting Francis Dudley, alias King Prawn, under his protection as well.

The bail for S3 detainees was so high it made Joel's teeth hurt, at $2,000 each. Joel didn't have that much sitting in his and Paul's regular joint account, and he knew it would have to come out of the house's chequing account for operations until he could move some money around on Monday. He could swear he heard a squeak when the screen on the debit machine said "Approved."

"Ransoming captives," Paul said, getting up to fill out his own set of forms. "The works of mercy, dude. Dorothy Day would be proud."

"I feel sick."

The woman picked up the phone and dialled an internal number. "Allô, Lisette? We need to start release processes for...you ready? Dudley, Francis. Kernizant, Marcelle. Martin, Jean-Paul. And Zikakis, Julien. That's it, thank you."

"It's the sound of freedom, man," Paul said. "The sound of the chains of injustice--"

"Stop."

"I'm trying to make you feel better. You're doing a good thing, _Frère Joël._ " Paul continued to whistle La Marseillaise as he signed his name with a flourish. 

There was a long wait afterwards, and Joel's stomach settled down. Paul was jittery and kept chattering about Bizet, for some reason, sounding like he was either trying to hold off a panic attack or edging into hypomania. Joel gave him one of his Klonopins, out of sight of the safety centre employees, and after that Paul calmed down again. Joel himself pulled out his beads and said a not-very-devout rosary for his very fervent desire that Prawn would be a pillar of society for the rest of his natural life.

It was almost twelve when the guards marched down the hall with the four released prisoners in tow. Paul nudged Joel. "Does the new kid remind you of anyone?"

"Uh, yeah." The boy bore more than a striking resemblance to Jeanne-Marie. The same wavy dark hair, the same blue eyes, the same killer cheekbones. "Do we have a type now or something?"

Mars, unexpectedly, ran for Joel and threw her arms around him. "Get us out of here."

"We're gonna have to split up, two of you take a cab," Paul said. "I'm not piling everybody into my car and risk getting a ticket. Nobody in the house is getting so much as a fine for littering over the next year, if I have anything to say about it."

 

In the end, Joel took a taxi home with Prawn, the both of them tall enough to appreciate not being crammed into the back of the Volvo. At the house, none of the former detainees had been fed yet, so Joel made buckwheat pancakes while Paul got the story out of them.

"How did you know what was going to happen?" Mars asked Prawn.

"There was -- I don't know -- a noise, I suppose. I want to say like a screech, because it was so loud, but the waves were very low, very long. I don't hear it with my ears, like, it's some other sort of sense. And there was a big flaring-up of heat, all in...in petals, almost, like a rose. That part I could see in infrared, like a light show. The cop probably yelled because he felt it." He blew on his tea. "Anyroad, I knew you don't hear radiation like that for nothing, it happens like that before big seismic activity, so I tried to send out a warning. I think I just wrecked everyone's TV and WiFi receptions, though."

"Well, you were trying, at least. Just like that telegraph guy on the sad Heritage Minute," Mars said, giving Prawn's hand a quick squeeze.

"I didn't know the gas main was going to get broken, but I knew it was going to be really bad."

The radio was on, and Joel turned it up when he heard the familiar four notes announcing the hourly news report. "Fire crews and paramedics are still engaged in rescue operations on Victoria Avenue tonight. Already seven people are confirmed dead, including three police officers. The damage was apparently caused by a young mutant, who is currently in critical but stable condition at Jewish General Hospital..."

Jean-Paul emerged from the bathroom, looking ill, and Joel gave him a smile. "We're eating in a while here, if you think you can take anything. You want to call your parents?"

The kid nodded. Joel directed him to a phone upstairs.

* * *

Jean-Paul, looking for the upstairs phone, opened the wrong door and he saw her. She was standing in front of the window, her image doubled in the glass and tripled in the mirror on the dresser. Getting ready for bed in a long white gown. He was struck with a sudden overpowering sense of familiarity -- not just her face, but something deeper. Two magnets.

She was brushing her hair when she saw him in the mirror. She put the brush down slowly. "Who are you?"

"I..." It wasn't like him to be at a loss for words. "I was looking for the phone."

"Who are you?" she said again, staring into his eyes, as if it were a coded question that he would have a secret answer for.

"Jean-Paul. Jean-Paul Martin."

Her eyes were the same blue as his. "I'm Jeanne-Marie Beaubier."

"Beaubier is...that's my name too." That slipped out unexpectedly. "Martin is my adopted family's name, I mean. When I was born it was Beaubier. And I had a sister, they told me I did." He wanted to make it sound casual, _wow, we might be related, that's so weird_ , but he couldn't do that. He couldn't pretend that this was nothing. The same strange feeling from earlier that evening came back to him, the feeling that everything and everyone else in the world was appallingly slow. Only this girl could have ever kept up with him.

She frowned, and reached up until her fingers were next to his cheek. For a moment she hesitated, and then she touched him.

And for a second the world became mercilessly, blindingly bright _(but he could see, he could see it all perfectly)_ , like lightning, like the sun on virgin snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I assume it's clear from the context, but just in case: a dépanneur (or just "dep") is a Quebec term for a convenience store. The term's used in English too, which is why I didn't just write "convenience store" -- feels wrong. "Legal Age Life at Variety Store" is a song from the classic Rheostatics album _Whale Music_.
> 
> If you don't know the reference to the Vince Coleman Heritage Minute, [here it is](https://www.historicacanada.ca/content/heritage-minutes/halifax-explosion). (I get teary every time.)
> 
> Blame Marvel for the cheesiness of "twins separated at birth", not me.


	4. The Ring of Gyges

_But such persons as are habituated to the disease_  
_know beforehand when they are about to be seized_  
_and flee from men; if their own house be at hand,_  
_they run home, but if not, to a deserted place,_  
_where as few persons as possible will see them_  
_falling, and they immediately cover themselves up._  
_This they do from shame of the affliction, and_  
_not from fear of the divinity, as many suppose._  
— Hippocrates, _On the Sacred Disease_

"Jean-Paul is _not_ a mutant," said Mme. Martin firmly. "He's too old. It would have manifested before now."

It was three in the morning, and Joel had been up since seven. He felt like someone had injected bleach into his joints. "It's unusual to manifest this late, yes. But it's not unheard of, and your son ran half a mile in less than a second."

M. Martin closed his eyes, and his wife crumpled her napkin in her fist.

"What were the results of the DNA test?" Mme. Martin asked.

"You won't get them until Monday. Might be later, definitely won't be sooner. When you do, you'll need to take Jean-Paul to the Clermont Building on Rue de Bleury to get his CRIM card. There's a fee of eighty dollars plus a fifty dollar fee for a background check." This was a practiced spiel; Joel was usually the one who talked to frightened and confused parents. He looked human, he was soft-spoken, he had enough privilege to not get dismissed right away.

"That's a pretty stiff price for something compulsory," M. Martin grumbled. "What happens to people who can't pay it?"

"If they attract any attention, they get taken away and put in Mile End." Joel went to the cardboard file cabinet and opened the drawer, looking for their file of government brochures. "In theory there's a...word...low-income people don't have to pay the same fee, anyway. But I've tried putting in the low-income paperwork for kids who've got nothing and in my experience, they get rejected for that option about 70% of the time. Sometimes we can pay for a kid's card, sometimes we're just skinning by for that month and we can't do it."

M. Martin flushed. "We'll compensate you for Jean-Paul's bail. Thank you for paying it," he said, a little stiffly.

Joel did kind of want to be compensated, but early on he'd learned that when he spent money on stuff like this, he needed to assume he was never going to see it again. That was the Catholic Worker ethos, but it was also the only way to stay sane. "It was meant as a gift, M. Martin. You don't owe us anything."

An awkward silence followed, and then Mme. Martin said, "Can I see him?"

"Of course, he's just through that door there in the living room."

M. Martin stayed behind at the kitchen table, turning his cup around and staring at his hands. Joel sat back down at the table with the file of brochures, dealing out the ones that the Martins might want. _Mutants in Québec: A Parent's Legal Guide. CRIM Card Application Step by Step. Let's Make Québec Safe! Why Is My Child a Mutant?_

"Some of these are kind of..." Joel decided not to use the word _problematic_ , but he couldn't think of another tactful term. Christ, he was tired. "They're not very positive. But there's some useful info in there."

"Everything's offensive to you guys, eh?" said M. Martin, picking up _Why Is My Child a Mutant?_

Joel didn't have the energy to play the game, so he just said, "Nope. Not everything."

"I just want to know what we're supposed to do, exactly," M. Martin went on. "How are we supposed to protect ourselves? Or do you just tear down the system to leave us with nothing?"

"I haven't said anything about tearing down the system."

"But that's what you want, isn't it? The CRIM cards, the safety centres, all this business. You want us to get rid of them, but dangerous mutants _do_ exist. That's a fact, it's not going away, and how are we supposed to live with that kind of threat?"

"I don't know," said Joel, filling his cup again from the lukewarm teapot, although the caffeine wasn't helping him so far. "If I had any ideas I guess I'd run for Parliament or something. There's always mutants policing mutants -- groups like the X-Men or the Avengers in the States."

"We've seen the X-Men mess up before," M. Martin said. "They didn't do so well with your father, did they?"

"They didn't bring him back alive, if that's what you mean," said Joel. He didn't have it in him to get pissed off. The guy was circling like a shark, looking for a reason to get mad at somebody, and his preference seemed to be getting mad at mutants. Better for him to get mad at Joel than at his own son. "I agree, I don't think that it's reasonable to expect quote-unquote superhero groups to handle any and every issue where a mutant breaks the law. They probably can't even handle _most_ of those cases. And we've seen that the Avengers can do a lot of collateral damage."

"So you have no solutions."

"I believe in a solution that very few people want to try."

M. Martin looked tight around the eyes, squinting as if the room were full of smoke. He shook his head, a _this is pointless_ gesture, and then got up to join his wife in the other room. Joel wondered what Professor Xavier would have said.

The Martins took Jean-Paul home without any more fanfare or fuss, and Joel turned the downstairs lights off. In the darkened house, he slipped once again into the Aphanes, only to find that he could still _see_ in that unnerving multi-dimensional vision. The darkness was still there, but he also perceived where the furniture was, where the carpet was rucked up on the stairs, where the light-switch was on the wall. It was accurate, as he saw when he became physical again to turn on the hall light: he wasn't simply hallucinating. Hallucinations weren't like that anyway, at least in his experience. One time, during a bad medication reaction at St. Rita's, he'd hallucinated that his skin was coming off in huge sheets, like toilet paper from a roll, and he was absolutely unable to disbelieve in it. Even the impulse to doubt never came to him. No dreamlike feeling. It was real, that was the horror. There was blood on the cafeteria table, so why couldn't other people see it? Who could deny something so obvious? Even after he awoke from the haze of the anti-psychotics, he'd been afraid -- not afraid that the hallucinations would come back, per se, but that his skin would start coming off again.

But this he could doubt.

On the second floor, he saw that Jeanne-Marie's light was still on. He knocked cautiously on the door, and waited for her muffled response. "Come in."

She was sitting still on the end of the bed, wearing her nightgown with her glasses folded in her lap, her bare toes curled up tight on the rug. Her fists, too, were balled up in her lap, but otherwise she seemed calm, blank. She looked up at him silently.

"Were you having trouble sleeping?" he asked, not knowing why he had come in here or what he wanted her to reveal.

"Sort of. Yes."

"Were we keeping you awake downstairs? With all the commotion tonight, I mean."

She shook her head. Joel took a few steps into the room, still hanging back from her a safe distance so that she wouldn't feel intimidated. "Uh -- this might not be the right time, but when I was at the school the other day Madame DuPont said...said you had some issues. She didn't elaborate much. But if you want to talk to a counsellor or something, I can set that up, no problem."

"I'm not crazy," she said flatly.

"That's not a word I would ever use for somebody who needs help." Joel turned to leave, resolving to attack this sometime when he had more than two molecules of serotonin to rub together. "If you need it, it's there. If you don't--"

"You know what I mean. Madame hates me. She's hated me for a long time," Jeanne-Marie insisted.

He paused. "Why does she hate you?"

"Because -- something happened. When my powers manifested. It's not because I'm a mutant," she said, looking down at her bare feet. "It was just...I guess that's all you need to know. She hates me."

"What happened?" Joel asked. He had learned over the years that if he stood very still and asked very quietly, sometimes kids would say what they were otherwise afraid to say.

"I was thirteen. And...you were there, at the school. You saw what it's like."

"Yeah. A little."

"So I wasn't -- I didn't want to--"

She wouldn't look up at him, and her fingers kept clenching and unclenching around nothing. Joel could see a lot of himself in her, in spite of their differences, so he sat down in the desk chair, and waited for her to find the words.

"I know it's wrong, I knew then too, but I just couldn't anymore, I couldn't stand it. I went to the window..."

So Paul's guess had been right. Joel didn't have a good response for that, and he just made a semi-voluntary sound that probably sounded more upset or judgemental than he intended.

"I know, I know." She was crying now. "I know it was wrong, you don't need to--"

"No, no, sorry, I wasn't going in that direction. Trust me. I'm in the club too here," he said with a wry little smile, pulling his sleeve back to display the scar on his wrist. "I just meant more like...that sucks a lot, you know?"

Jeanne-Marie wiped her face with a tissue from the nightstand. "Okay. Well. It didn't work. I didn't fall. I could fly. They didn't tell us about mutants at Madame DuPont's, and we didn't hear about them any other way. We didn't watch TV, and I was too young for newspapers. No internet, nothing. But I knew that the saints could fly, some of them. Teresa of Avila could."

"Yeah. And Christina the Astonishing." Joel smiled. "They named the mutant girls' psych hospital in Ottawa after her."

"Like, I didn't think I _was_ a saint. But I told Madame DuPont that a miracle had happened. I thought that I'd been given a special grace to save my own life, because in the moment that I fell from the window...I was so scared, I wanted to take it back. God showed me a beautiful mercy by letting me take it back. Madame DuPont didn't see it that way," Jeanne-Marie added bitterly. "I should have known better. She -- she said I was blaspheming."

"You were just confused."

She shook her head. "You can't talk Madame out of a punishment. She doesn't change her mind. You must have noticed that?"

"I kinda figured. What did she do to you?"

Jeanne-Marie shrugged. "I don't want to go into details."

Neither did Joel, truth be told. He was bleary-eyed and knew his health was too fragile to pull an all-nighter doing amateur psychotherapy. "Maybe we can talk about this tomorrow."

"Hey," she said before he left. "Mutants have special names, right? They can choose their own, if their families don't want them anymore."

"Not everyone does, but you can if you want," Joel said, paused at the door. "Why, is there a different name you'd like us to use?"

She nodded, and gave him a smile -- a wide grin with a mischievous edge, something he would have thought he'd have to wait a long time to see. "Call me Aurora?"

"Sure, yeah. I'll let people know. That's pretty," he said.

"Thank you."

* * *

Joel woke up on the bathroom floor the next morning, a dull pain in the back of his head and a sharp one in his shoulder. He was lying in a pool of urine, and for a long few moments he couldn't quite put together why that might be. He remembered going to bed, collapsing into physicality inches above the mattress, but had no recollection of getting up. The sun was glaring through the southern-exposure window in the bathroom, so it was at least eleven now.

Bad sun. Way too bright. His brain violently objected to his moving a quarter of an inch. It also wasn't happy about blinking. Left arm asleep and rubbery-numb, full of pins and needles. Tongue swollen and bloody, a slimy pool of red-streaked saliva under his cheek.

He rolled over, noting with despair that the bath mat was soaked with piss. And it hadn't even broken his fall much. Standing up in the shower wasn't going to happen, so he dragged himself up enough to reach the bathtub taps. Big noise, noisy water. A searing pain flared in his side whenever he moved -- had he broken a rib? Big plum-dark bruises on his right side, and when he pressed them he winced. As the tub was filling, he sat with his back against the wall and tried to will away the throbbing in his head. _Shh. Everybody settle down in there._

Under the sound of the rushing water, he could hear Paul listening to _Saturday Afternoon at the Opera_ on CBC radio. The aria was familiar, one of Paul's favourites, but Joel couldn't place it. Songs of people who had the luxury of leaving dying words, a big finish instead of a dumb mistake. What the hell was it? Something really famous. It was in a movie.

Paul was banging on the door and the overflow gasket on the tub was gurgling.

A blank moment. Then Paul was bent over Joel, lifting his chin gently, repeating his name over and over. "Are you back yet?"

Joel managed a groan.

"Hey. Hey. Look at me. Can you squeeze my hand?"

Joel squeezed, but he couldn't speak yet. It was like having a whole pile of auto parts and being asked to build a Mercedes. Obviously people did it every day, but it was pretty complicated and he wasn't up to the challenge. If people left him alone he usually slept for awhile after a seizure, and woke up more or less capable of basic human interaction, but today he couldn't get stable. Sleep would've been nice. He was clammy from the wet bathmat. The tub wasn't making noise anymore, but he reached over and slapped the side of it.

Paul shook his head. "Not right now, dude, okay? You can wash up later. Do you want some water?"

Joel produced a vague _hnngh_ sound that didn't answer the question, and he wasn't even sure himself. Water? No. Maybe. Get rid of the taste of blood. "Mm."

Paul ran the water in the sink and filled the plastic cup halfway. "I'm sorry I didn't hear you, I'm _so_ sorry, I should have noticed you'd been gone for awhile. And the stupid fucking stereo was on, that's my fault."

And that set him off. Joel often got sideswiped by unreasonable emotions when he was post-ictal, and the smallest things made him cry. This time it was Paul feeling guilty over something that was nobody's fault. _Am I fucking infecting him or what? Ruining all the things I love about other people. Can't even talk to tell him it's not his problem._ For awhile he couldn't do anything else, just sat on the floor with the plastic cup and cried.

"Hey, hey, no, shh..." Paul understood that the crying was just a symptom, but he still tended to panic when it happened. Other symptoms didn't phase him, but with his empathic mutation, emotions always hit him hard. He was green-gold flecked with violet, like a stubborn bruise, and he sat down next to Joel on the floor, ignoring the piss, and put his arms around him. "It's okay, it's okay. Just take it easy, man, take it easy..."

"I don't know." It was the first phrase that came back to him, usually, and he would say it for awhile even when he was trying to get other messages across.

"Yeah, you're okay. You want more water? No? Right, I know you're sleepy, I can smell it. All cottony. But listen, I want to call Dr. Stein, okay? You can lie down while I do it, but if you're able to talk by the time I get through to her, that might be useful."

"I don't know. Wet," Joel said after a second.

"Wet? I know, yeah, sorry. Just hang on. You can shower soon, not now. I just don't want you to drown or slip or something." Paul pulled the towels off the rack and walked away for a few seconds, still saying some words, and then came back to draw Joel up to his feet. "C'mon. Lying down. You're okay, I won't let you fall..."

Joel made it to the pile of towels on the bed, still mumbling _I don't know_. He remembered that he'd had plans for today: talk to Jeanne-Marie, update the chore schedule to keep Prawn busy, call Hodya, decide on a plan for seeing family on Christmas and his birthday, go to the hardware store to get a new handle for the tap in the bathroom downstairs. Ox had carelessly snapped it off, and it wasn't a big deal to repair it, but it sure wasn't going to happen today.

For awhile he watched a black crow as it shuffled its feet on a branch outside the window, and the crow looked back at him.

He dreamed he was on a tiny coracle, rowing across the ocean under a grey sky. Going east, but the waves kept pushing him back towards the scratchy map coast of Vineland. There were no islands and there was nothing in the water.

A hand on his shoulder, a warm hand. Paul. "Hey. Dr. Stein called back. She wants you to come in to the hospital."

Joel managed to sit up. This time the words came. "How come?"

"She says she's worried about your meds and she doesn't want to wait until after Christmas break to see you in the office. And she wants to do the referral for the experimental guy in Repentigny."

"Christ." He rubbed his eyes. "Okay, can you drive me?"

"No, you'll have to walk. Of course I'm fucking driving you."

* * *

Even before his mutation had manifested, Paul had suffered from a bunch of weird digestive issues, and the accompanying weight loss had put him in the hospital frequently. By now, he knew how all the tricks for getting out of the ER waiting room and onto the top of the triage list. Vomit and you get immediate attention. Faint. Claim chest pains. But clearly seizures were a pretty fast ticket to service too.

Joel blanked out twice in the car, or so Paul thought -- it wasn't easy to spot absence seizures while he was trying to drive, although if he looked there was a telltale movement of the jaw, odd blinking. Joel was verbal but not very articulate, and had to keep asking where they were going.

They went to Jewish General, where Dr. Stein had privileges, and they were still at the registry desk when Joel went white and whispered, "Bees, bees."

Bees were bad news. "That's an aura, he's going to have another grand mal," Paul told the nurse.

They loaded Joel on a gurney and trucked him away from the frightened onlookers in the waiting room. Paul followed, because no one had told him to stay behind. The grand mal seizures scared him, but it scared him even more not to look: he had to see how bad it was, had to look for good signs or bad signs, had to watch because it was the only thing he could do. Not looking only intensified the feeling of powerlessness. But after a few minutes he noticed the same thing the nurses did.

"It's not stopping."

"We know," one said shortly. They were already wheeling him towards an examination room. Paul trotted to keep up, and the nurse said, "Are you a family member?"

"I'm his brother," Paul said immediately.

She seemed to buy it, or (more likely) she was too busy to care. They let him stay.

Joel liked to call Paul a hypochondriac because he read all the patient information sheets that came with his prescriptions and kept the Merck manual in the bathroom. Paul wasn't a hypochondriac; he had a file full of diagnoses, but that wasn't one of them. He liked medicine and he liked being informed -- not a genius at science, but he got by. And in emergencies, he could keep himself occupied by imagining all the dire things that could be going wrong.

The room smelled of adrenaline, pungent like vinegar. A med student had arrived, a handsome young Indian guy with a sleek shaved head and beautiful cheekbones. Paul hated himself for noticing. 

He prayed, because he thought Joel would want that. A superstitious string of Hail Marys, the words running together. Paul did believe, but sometimes he felt inadequate about it because he didn't always know the right terms or the reasons behind things. He didn't get whatever it was that Joel got out of religion, but it still fucking mattered to him. _Maybe it matters because it's your thing, because it's part of you, but is that so bad?_

Dr. Stein arrived as Handsome Cheekbones was attempting to give Joel a needle. Paul was fond of gory horror movies and zombie games, but actual blood in real life made him very squeamish. _"Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâces..."_

"Shoot," said Handsome Cheekbones mildly. "That didn't work."

"Get him on his side and give him an IM injection of lorazepam."

"Isn't that--"

"Better than making a bigger mess of that vein."

_"...le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni..."_

"And why not diazepam?"

"Poorly absorbed through muscle tissue, plus the need for repeated injections...?"

"Good man."

_"...maintenant et à l'heure de notre mort..."_

"There we go."

The irregular thumping of Joel's elbows against the gurney eased, and Paul let himself open his eyes. Blood had spattered the cute med student's scrubs. Joel's skin went from cyanotic to merely pale, lying still, breathing loudly but deeply. A minute or two later he opened his eyes, probably because a phlebotomist was fastening her tourniquet around his arm.

"Hi there," Dr. Stein said to him, in the bluff tone that doctors love. She was a very small woman with short grey hair and tiny silver-rimmed glasses, and just seeing her always made Paul's blood pressure drop back to normal. "You know where you are?"

"Mm."

"You're gonna need a few before you can talk, huh? That's okay. You're in hospital, at Jewish General. Paul's right here -- I'll let you get within hand-holding range," said Dr. Stein, moving aside so that Paul could stand by the gurney. She seemed to assume they were a couple, and they never corrected her. Whatever would let them stay with each other in the hospital. 

"So did we miss a dose of clonazepam?" said Dr. Stein.

"I don't know," Joel muttered, eyes falling shut as the phlebotomist took her needles and bottles away.

"I'm pretty sure he missed some," Paul said. "We had some circumstances last night. We weren't off to a regular start this morning. And he's been working too hard."

Dr. Stein nodded. "That'll do it. Really, really important to take meds at the same time every day, guys. Even an hour will make a difference. Joel's mutation makes drugs in that family zap right through his metabolism -- who knows why, but it does. Normally clonazepam has a long half-life, but for him it's not so forgiving. I'll remind him again when he stops being zoned out, but you can remind him too. Stress and lack of sleep do a number on his system. This is why I'm so eager to set something up with Dr. Gervais in Repentigny."

Paul nodded, still feeling guilty. The people passing through the corridor were staring at him, and now that the immediate crisis was over he was seized with a desire to get away. Strong feelings made him fluoresce very brightly, flashes of sour yellow and lime green skating over his hands. He put them in his pockets.

"He'll be asleep for awhile," said Dr. Stein. "You can go home and rest for an hour or two, if you want. We'll run bloodwork and do an EEG, just in case there's anything to see there. Besides that, all we can do is make sure he takes the meds like clockwork. Eight hours of sleep a night is the absolute _minimum_ , and have him try staying in his invisible state for at least an hour a day. More, if possible."

"Are you keeping him overnight?"

"Not unless he goes into status epilepticus again, I don't think," she said. "Don't quote me on that, but we'll see how things look in a few hours. Neurology's crowded right now, but if he needs a night of observation then that's what we'll do."

She left, and Paul went outside to the car, where he called Ottawa. The conversation was short -- Mrs. McCree sounded like she was in a hurry to get somewhere.

"He won't want me to come see him, so there's not much I can do," she said. "I mean, you can ask him when he wakes up and if he wants me there I'll come, but that's not very likely."

"It doesn't sound like him," Paul admitted, resting his arms on top of the steering wheel, watching a family pass by in the parking lot. Mylar balloons, curly ribbons. "I knew he was pushing it with his schedule, I should have made him slow down--"

"Don't be silly, Paul, this isn't your fault." It was brisk but kind. "He's an adult and he understands what stress does to his system. I'm not blaming him either but he needs to...ugh, listen to me. The point is that there wasn't any permanent damage done. Just make sure he eats, all right? Bring him food, if you have to."

"I will."

"I'm glad you're there, Paul. I know it's a thankless job, but you're a really good friend, you know that?" she said. "Thank you for calling to let me know. Merry Christmas, if we don't see you again before the holiday."

Polite. Joel had a nice family, really; they struggled and suffered, but they followed the rules and did their duty, which was more than Paul's own family had done. There was no point in him calling his own parents for Christmas, because they would let the call go to voicemail and never return it. Emails unanswered. Christmas cards went through the red mailbox door and then were never seen again. They had barely tolerated Paul's mutation -- his mother had been convinced for two years that all the doctors were quacks, that it was really some extremely rare skin disorder -- and they weren't thrilled when he had his first florid bout of psychotic mania. Homosexuality had been strike three, but if it hadn't been that it would have been something else, Paul thought. He would have found some other way to fail them.

He missed them, which was the worst part. Even his sister Noémie, who had stayed loyal for so long, didn't answer his texts anymore. It was less like she'd rejected him and more like she'd just forgotten he was still out there, and that almost hurt more. _If you don't even hate me, then why won't you talk to me?_ Facebook said she was engaged now, and Paul had posted a hopeful little message of congratulations on her wall, but she hadn't answered. Hadn't even pressed Like, the laziest possible indication that she still gave a shit. 

Paul started the car, and got as far as Rue Légaré before he felt like he was drowning. The snow was ashes. Death was leaking through from the houses, from the side streets, from the sewers. He would be swept up in the swell and lost, he would be thrown against the rocks and crushed. He made an abrupt and illegal U-turn, drove back into the hospital parking lot, and took the bus home. He was still shaking as he got off on Prince Arthur and walked down Rue Sainte Famille towards home.

* * *

Joel woke up alone. Every muscle in his body felt like it had been kicked, squeezed, pulled, bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated. Grand mals were a full body workout. His head was fuzzy but he could think in complete sentences, and he knew where he was. _Awesome._ The old familiar Neurology ward: five other men, all old and motionless, lay drooling in their sleep, curtains dividing each from each. Monitor beeps and the hushed susurration of IV pumps. The sitter, a middle-aged Black woman, sat with a sudoku puzzle book at the far end of the room, her pencil scraping lightly on the page. She had one of those clip-on lights attached to her book, illuminating her face from below in gold. Joel watched her for awhile, blearily enchanted by the play of light on her glasses.

A covered tray sat at the end of the bed, but on the table there was a small white bakery box and a card. He had zero appetite so he ignored the box, but opened the envelope to see the card. It was apparently from Nour, not from Paul; Nour had been one of the first kids to stay at the house, a nonbinary crust punk kid who'd left Fattal after their powers first manifested. Nour was one of those mutants whose power didn't really have any kind of positive application -- they could cause serious brain damage to people with psionic blasts, and that was it. Tough to come to terms with. But Nour was a good kid, and they still came by the house pretty often when they found a particularly rich treasure trove while dumpster diving. _Do you guys want these cases of rice pudding I found at Atwater?_ Today must have been a good food day, if Nour had come by the house and heard that Joel was in the hospital. 

The card was a little girl's birthday card with a Persian kitten on it, and Nour had scratched out the printed inside message, scrawling _Get well, Saint Joel._ A kiss of glittery black lipstick. Everyone had signed it: _Love from Nour, Paul, Grace, Arlette, Ox, Requin, Mars, Marrina, Kara, Prawn, and Jeanne-Marie._

It made Joel smile, and he propped the card up on his bedside table. No plastic pitcher or water glass there -- _what kind of service is that?_ A catheter poked out of the back of his left hand, but he wasn't connected to an IV line. He decided to take a wander down the hall to see if he could find a drink machine. Or failing that, a nurse who would pity him and give him some flat ginger ale. 

He didn't embarrass himself by falling on his face on the way to the bathroom with his bag, although his coordination was off and he missed the doorknob the first time. He changed out of the hospital gown and into the track pants and t-shirt Paul had packed for him, then shuffled out into the bright hallway.

He walked right past the policewoman sitting outside the door of the ward, barely registering her presence until she spoke to him. "You're awake."

"Me?" he said, still stupid from the drugs but aware that something was wrong. "What -- I haven't done anything."

She smiled. "Of course not. You're not in trouble, I just want to talk to you. Meant to talk to you this morning, but you were sick, so I've been waiting around. Got a minute? I'm Corporal Heather McNeil, RCMP."

Joel shook her hand. "Uh -- can this wait till tomorrow?"

"Honestly, I'd really rather get this done tonight. It shouldn't take half an hour, if all goes well." She had red hair, a real Anne of Green Gables red, pulled back in a knot at the back of her head, and carried her forage cap under her arm with a clipboard and a zippered nylon file case. "Somewhere private? Let's go."

 _This might as well happen,_ Joel thought, and followed her.

She led him down the hall to the elevator. As they were going down, she said quietly, "For the record, you've got nothing to be afraid of. I'm totally mutant-friendly, no issues there."

"You followed me into the hospital. And you waited all _day_ \--"

"I mean this in the nicest way, but don't flatter yourself. We're at JGH for something else, but it's a lucky bonus that you're here at the same time. If you hadn't been we would have gone by your house, but sometimes everything comes together," she said, watching the numbers change on the elevator screen.

She led him into a small sitting room on the day surgery wing, and gestured for him to take a seat. She took a digital recorder from her briefcase and held it up. "Do you mind?"

"Actually I do," Joel said, wondering if he was going to have to call his lawyer over this bullshit. "I don't even know what you want to talk about, and I haven't committed a crime, and I'm drugged to the gills. I don't even know how many seizures I've had today. Why do you want to record this?"

"Easy, tiger. It's for my own purposes, taking notes and making sure I remember this conversation accurately. I asked if it was okay. All you had to say was no." She put the recorder away again. "Look. Like you said, you haven't committed a crime. I know you had a rough day, and I'm sorry to be bugging you, all right? I really am. You can walk out and go back to bed anytime you want. But we'd appreciate it if you'd help us out here, just as a citizen. Okay?"

Apologies from cops were interesting rarities, but not actually that valuable. Joel was slumped over the table, chin propped on his hand, but he raised his eyebrows for her to go on.

"Thanks." She opened the cover of her clipboard and turned a few pages. "Last night, Mr. McCree, you and your partner bailed four mutants out of Mile End Safety Centre. Is partner a good word?"

"It's fine."

"So those mutants were witnesses to the incident on Victoria Avenue, and we will need to talk to them."

Joel didn't see how his input was necessary there. "So go do that? You'll have to ask them, not me."

"Right, but the thing is they're in your house," said Corporal McNeil. "When it comes to mutants in St. John of God House, the metro police have noticed that you're very -- shall we say -- defensive?"

"What does that mean?" Joel arranged lawyers for mutants who were facing charges, when he could. His uncle Martin was a criminal lawyer who occasionally did pro bono work for the mutant community in the city, but most of the time Joel had to pay from his own pocket. Even one case a year was enough to make things tight in the house. It was a card he played in dire situations, not an everyday thing.

"It _means_ that the metro police remember the incident two years ago; I don't know if you do. A minor facing arrest left your house by a back door, hopped a fence onto the property of Saint-Sulpice parish, and claimed sanctuary inside the church building." She traced a small circle in the air with the pen she held in her hand. "Sound familiar?"

"Oh my God. Seriously? That lasted two days and then the police came and took the kid anyway. Why is that relevant?"

"Weird idea for a fifteen-year-old to get into his head, isn't it?" she said. "Medieval stuff. If I was in trouble like that when I was fifteen, it wouldn't have crossed my mind to run into a church."

"And?"

"Okay, I won't be subtle. You coached a teenager on how to evade the law. Can we prove that? No. Leaning on you would've been really bad optics, so the cops didn't pursue it. It already looked bad enough, dragging a kid out of a Catholic church in handcuffs. So sure, officially, for all we know the kid might've just been a big Victor Hugo fan and it was all his idea." She shrugged, tipping her head to one side, watching him. "Unofficially, we know you were pulling strings."

There were a lot of things he could say to that, but some of them might get him in trouble. Joel sighed and said formally, as if it were a prepared text, "Corporal, the gravity of these statements concerns me and in this setting, I would prefer not to answer them hastily and without the presence of legal counsel. If you have allegations to make against me I would like to see them in writing before I make any response."

"Wow," Corporal McNeil said. "That's the most polite version of 'I ain't saying shit to the cops' I ever heard."

"Thank you."

She let the pages fall back and closed the cover of her clipboard. "Can we start over? I'm not trying to scare you. I'm not trying to get you in trouble. My point, in bringing up the sanctuary claim, is that we know you go to bat for the kids at your house. So I'm saying that we need to talk to those mutants who were at the Victoria Avenue scene, and I'm giving you a heads-up about that out of respect. You know we'll be coming and you know why. Please don't make it difficult."

"Okay, but my point is that I don't actually control the reactions kids have to police, even if they are in my house," Joel said. "I'm weirded out that you think I do. My social skills aren't that good. Can I have some water?"

She gave him the kind of look that he associated with teachers who liked him but were sick of his bullshit, a slightly pained closed-mouth smile. "Water, sure. Wait here, I'll grab a bottle, and then we have something different to talk about. Okay?"

"Okay."

She left and he waited, listening to the hospital sounds: footsteps, the wheels of a shift nurse's meds cart, small talk between orderlies about the Habs, beeps and coded phrases on the P.A. system. 

He'd actually dozed off, and when Corporal McNeil came back with the Dasani bottle he jolted awake again. "Sorry, sorry -- thanks--"

"How you doing?" she asked, more sympathetic now. "You're really out of it, huh?"

"I'm actually great right now, not even being sarcastic," Joel said, cracking the bottle open. "Last time I was conscious today I couldn't talk...uh, what day is it?"

"Saturday night."

"Okay, that's what I thought. Good."

"You were giving me so much lawyer-talk that I sort of assumed you were better than you are," she said, sitting down again on the other side of the table. "Or is that just second-nature?"

"It's a conversation that I've been through before, with the metro cops," Joel said, after downing a quarter of the bottle. "Over and over. I might not be so articulate about other stuff. What did you want to talk about?"

"Right, I don't want to tire you out too much. So back around the time when your father passed, you talked to Inspector Jérôme Brazeau from headquarters in Ottawa. Big guy, unibrow, kind of abrupt?"

"Yeah, I remember."

"He asked you about your feelings with regard to possibly working with the RCMP." Corporal McNeil pointed her pen at him as she looked through her notes. "You were pretty down on the idea. But we're hoping that time has changed your feelings on the subject. The RCMP has a new associated body which we're calling Department H, at least until we get a supply budget and have to come up with something to put on the letterhead." 

Joel felt like he was on the phone with a telemarketer, trying to wait for a good spot to politely interrupt the spiel and go _no thanks, goodbye_ , but it didn't feel like that moment had arrived yet. "Okay..."

"You've dealt with the X-Men before -- Department H is simply a government-operated version of the same. We're hoping that the department will be effective enough that we can phase out the CRIM cards and the safety centres. We start in Ottawa, and if it's successful we initiate more detachments in other cities, eventually leading to regional coverage for rural areas. That's the plan, anyway." She clicked her pen a couple of times, awkward. "We would be very interested in using you -- your talents -- in an intelligence capacity. You wouldn't be asked to perform any duties involving combat; I know you're pretty pacifistic, that's on the record."

"You know what I'm gonna say here."

"Yeah, I do, but I'm asking you _not_ to make a knee-jerk decision," said Corporal McNeil, leaning forward. "Having the right police intelligence can save lives, especially when it comes to mutants. Pro-mutant terrorism isn't just a scare tactic, it's a real thing. There are groups in this country who just respond to anti-mutant hate by getting violent themselves, and somebody has to stop them. De-escalating situations is a lot easier when you have the right intel. Like, I'm sorry, and I'm not just bringing your dad up in order to push your buttons, but the Jim McCree case is _textbook._ The X-Men and the RCMP did their best, but if they'd had better intel they would have done better."

"Listen," Joel said, to stop her from going on, "I totally believe you. Cops want to have an operative they can send in who won't get seen and won't get shot, yeah. Makes sense. But here's problem number one: I would suck at that job. Maybe I have the right mutation but I sure as hell have the wrong personality. My memory is garbage, I panic easy, and stress makes my brain short out."

"I think you're underestimating yourself," said Corporal McNeil.

Joel kept going, trying not to get sidetracked. "Problem number two is that my issue with violence goes further than just...not wanting to do it myself. This might get me put on some kind of list, but I don't want any organisation using violence to exist, and that includes police and the military."

She sighed, sitting back and folding her arms. "How old are you? Twenty-three?"

"Almost. Birthday next week. I know how I sound, you don't have to tell me." People called Joel a dumb immature idealist fairly often, and usually it didn't trigger his social anxiety. Maybe that was because it wasn't some hidden animus that he had to guess about, or maybe it was because he knew he could avoid it if he chose; theoretically, at any time he could disavow the whole idea and people would congratulate him on his maturity. The discomfort thus had an exit door, which made it easier to bear.

"I'm not being hostile," Corporal McNeil said wearily, "but yeah, that doesn't sound very practical. How exactly do you propose we deal with violent people?"

Joel had gone through this topic over and over with different people, but with his bloodstream full of drugs he knew that he couldn't wrangle a long or complex argument. "Police forces aren't a universal feature of human cultures. Historically, they're pretty new. Communities can and do cooperate to prevent violence -- it happens all the time."

"Prevention and cooperation is great, and I believe in that too," said Corporal McNeil. "But people are people. They hurt each other. That's going to happen no matter what. What are we supposed to do after the violence already happened? Who catches serial killers, in this utopia of yours? Who punishes them?"

"Serial killers thrive in atomised societies with high population density and strong class differences. If I told you about a serial killer in...I don't know, a pre-Columbian Lakota band, you'd think that was weird. Right? That's a man bites dog story."

"Going back to a hunter-gatherer society isn't going to happen."

"It doesn't have to be hunter-gatherers. I'm just talking about community. Small groups of people who are involved with each other's lives, where there aren't huge gaps between the rich and the poor. Those already exist, and they're dramatically less violent--"

"Joel, most of your average people in North America are not going to go for that," Corporal McNeil interrupted quietly. "Why should they? They live peaceful lives, they don't have any problems with cops, and they feel safer knowing that cops have guns and the government has bombs. They don't want to completely rewrite the rules. They want a world pretty much like this one, but where mutants can't destroy whole stretches of Victoria Avenue. They want the world they used to _have_ before mutants became a significant minority. In their view, they haven't done anything wrong, so why should they be the ones who have to change?"

"I know people don't want it. I'm not that naive." Joel picked at the label on the water bottle with his thumbnail. "But you asked how I think it _could_ work, and that's the answer. Have I convinced you yet that you don't want to work with me?"

"What, because we disagree about stuff? I'm not that kind of asshole," she said, leaning back to stretch her arms over her head, a _pop_ issuing from her neck. "Here's the thing. If Department H works, that means the end of the safety centres. We can stop mutants from dying in police custody when scared, angry, bigoted cops take them in. It means more mutants will have steady, secure jobs. You know what the RCMP pays recruits? A _lot._ Mutants working to protect ordinary people, human and mutant alike -- that's going to do a lot to repair relations between the two groups." 

Joel said nothing.

"To me, that sounds like a better way to make our actual society become less violent, rather than just sitting there and allowing the arrests of innocent mutants," she said. "Because the status quo sucks."

"Look, what -- what exactly would you want me to do?" Joel said finally. He wasn't weakening, he was just asking. That was all.

Corporal McNeil smiled. "Gather information. That's all. You can dictate the terms of your contract if you want. We know you're trying to get into Holy Orders and that might take precedence. If that's how things work out, no harm no foul. I'm Catholic myself, so I get it."

"Yeah, that's not really...a thing anymore." Joel felt himself dissolve into partial visibility. He was uneasy. It made him think of Paul's most nervous colours, his dull oranges and queasy yellow-greens. This would have been easier with Paul here. "I don't like this," he murmured.

"You don't have to take my word for it. Your friend Niko Putkonen is working for us in Ottawa. I can give you a number where you can reach her."

"Niko's okay?"

"Of course. You know Kyle Gibney too, right? He's signed on with us as well, and he's made a ton of progress already."

"Uh, wow." That was a lot to take in. "Yes. Get me in touch with them, I mean."

Corporal McNeil got a card from her filecase and wrote on the back of it, then handed it to Joel. "Dial in that extension. We use codenames, so ask for Freezeframe. Kyle goes by Wildchild. You'll be added to the list of acceptable callers."

"Wildchild? You're serious?" The headache was back; he was going to have to get something from the nurses to get back to sleep. "Are you guys just chatting up every mutant in the city or what?"

"No, but I can see why you'd feel like we're working through everybody you know. There's definitely a Kevin Bacon effect with mutants in the city, since a lot of them either spent time at your house or they know someone who did. We've already spoken to Jean-Paul Martin, for instance. And we're super interested in Francis Dudley."

Joel took a second to translate that. "Wait, you're recruiting _Prawn_? He's not even Canadian."

Corporal McNeil shrugged. "Nobody's perfect."

How many other people were in on this? "I need some time to think about this. Is that okay?"

"That's a better response than I was expecting to get, actually," she said. "You can have some time, but we'll need an answer after New Year's. Department H has a lot of funding at its disposal, for now, but if we don't produce some results soon we risk losing everything. We need mutants. And, you know, no pressure, but Canada needs mutants too." She gathered up her things, pushing her chair back. "You can call me any time at that number I gave you. Just tell them you're looking for Heather McNeil -- I don't get a codename, what a ripoff, eh?" 

Joel gave her a smile, standing up even though his balance was still a little weird. "I like real names. More dignified."

"You're no fun. Anyway, thanks for hearing me out. We really do appreciate it." She shook his hand again. "Hope you feel better soon."

"Thanks."

She left him alone in the little sitting room, and Joel started to trudge back toward his room...and then stopped. He didn't have to just go back to bed and lie there, waiting for a headache pill to kick in and wondering what the Mounties were up to. He paused for a moment in the hallway, glancing back -- Corporal McNeil had turned a corner but was still close. He then plunged fully into the Aphanes and followed her. 

Way back when Joel's powers had first manifested, his father had come to the hospital with a worn-out copy of Plato's _Republic_ and read him the story of the Ring of Gyges. Joel hadn't had much time to even think about what he could do; his power felt more like a weird variation on his seizures. It was something that dragged him away from the rest of the world and left him empty, surrounded by nothingness, rather than anything he could consciously use to invade other people's privacy. He'd felt ashamed of himself, knowing that his father had heard about this and assumed Joel would need reminding about the principles of basic human decency.

And even now that his power was more under control, he _wasn't_ invasive. He cared about his own privacy and he cared about other people's too. And he didn't particularly like the feeling of being completely unnoticed, watching people when they thought they were alone -- it was sad, it was embarrassing, and it made all his scarred old feelings of loneliness ache like old injuries in bad weather.

But this time he'd given in.

Corporal McNeil took the elevator back up to the Neurology floor, and Joel followed after the car on its metal cables. She got off and strode past the nurses' station to another ward, where two more officers were waiting.

"I spoke to McCree," she said. "So that's done."

"And?"

"Weird kid. But he seemed really genuinely sick, so maybe it's not fair to judge him on that right now. I felt bad about keeping him awake. Anyway, he dug in his heels a lot and gave me some ideological runaround, but he didn't say no. Wouldn't call him a _solid_ maybe, but he's a maybe."

One of the other Mounties nodded. "That's some pretty good progress, good work. Hudson'll be glad if we can get anybody for covert stuff. The kid here's awake, by the way."

"Thanks."

Corporal McNeil went into the ward, where a skinny teenage girl was reading in bed under the dim light of her bedside lamp. Her head was bandaged, part of her long brown hair shaved off, and underneath the dressing Joel could see the ragged edges of the wound, the sutures as fine as the doctors could make them. When she saw Corporal McNeil, she flinched, knees drawing up under the blanket.

"Hey, relax. It's Bridget, right? We just want to talk."

"I never meant to hurt anybody," the girl whispered. "You have to believe me, I didn't know."

"Of course I believe you. You're a good kid, and you're not stupid. Why would you wreck two police cars and four blocks of a city street? All you got out of it was a bad concussion. Even the most hardass Crown attorney isn't going to try to claim you did it on purpose."

The girl's voice creaked. "Really?"

"Really. And look, the Crown doesn't have to get involved here at all. We can belay all the court stuff if we arrange some alternative plan for you to get more control over your powers. There's a government service now -- it's new -- to help you do that. You can learn to control your gift, and use it to help other people."

The girl, Bridget, rubbed the back of her neck. Again, she said, "Really? You'd help me, after what I did?"

"Yes. We really would."

"But I killed three cops. I _killed_ people, Jesus..."

"It's all right, it's all right." Corporal McNeil gave the girl a hug. "You didn't mean to, everybody knows that. You were scared. It's okay..."

Bridget sobbed in the corporal's arms, and Joel felt too embarrassed to stay there watching them. He ghosted out of the ward and found an empty stretch of hallway, where he became physical again and walked back to his room. Like Bridget, he wore the bright yellow hospital wristband that designated him as a mutant, but there was still no need to alarm the ward sitter more than necessary.

* * *

Polyclinique Ste-Claire was a small glass-fronted building in Westmount, with security guards, futuristic track lighting, and hexagonal reception desks to make the place look important. Like you were getting something for your money. Joel didn't approve of private clinics as a matter of principle, and now here he was sitting in one, staring at an issue of _Maisonneuve_ and trying not to feel guilty.

Dr. Stein had authorised his release from the hospital yesterday morning, and told him with palpable excitement about Dr. Gervais. "You're incredibly lucky -- he had a cancellation on Monday the twenty-second, so you'll get to see him before his Christmas break. Nothing's a guarantee in neurology, but I have such a good feeling about this, Joel. He might really be able to help you."

Joel was officially ready to try anything. Fucking anything. This morning yet another tonic-clonic seizure had struck in with its aura of bees. He'd had time to get to bed, and was even lucky enough not to shit himself, but now his temples and forehead were throbbing and he felt hungover. He was almost late to the appointment. He hadn't brought Paul, mostly because he felt like Paul had put up with enough over the last few days. _It's just in Westmount, I can get myself there on the metro. I'll be fine._

The post-ictal haze combined with the woolly mental effects of the meds made it hard to pay attention to anything, but something was bothering Joel about the security guard. The man looked far too...serious? Something. Too lumpy. Joel took a minute or two to work out what the problem was: he was armed. There were several lumps on his belt, but one of them was almost certainly a holster. 

The guy wasn't a cop, and there weren't too many other exceptions to the laws on handguns. You could get an exception if your job was considered dangerous, but it was rarely granted.

Why? A private ambulatory clinic -- was security even necessary at all? The two other patients in the waiting room were much like Joel: underfed, weary-looking, spaced out. You didn't get violent cases in an outpatient setting, generally, and even then there was no need to shoot anybody.

The answer came to him a few minutes later, when he felt a familiar tickle against his mind, the sort of accidental elbow-bump of an inexperienced telepath that was common at Dr. Xavier's. Of course, of course, the mutant thing. Dangerous mutants, arm your security guards and check their identity papers. Joel looked up from his magazine, trying to guess which of the waiting patients was the telepath. One was a girl with long, greasy blonde hair and shadowed eyes, while the other was a boy his own age, listening to an iPod and sweating profusely. Probably the girl. Joel wondered if he could go into the Aphanes fast enough to dodge a bullet.

The nurse called him into a small, undecorated examination room. No desk, file cabinet, or shelves; only a paper-covered table, a sink, formica cabinets. Joel was surprised, since he'd only come in for a consultation and had been expecting an office visit. _Do I take my pants off for this or what?_

Better not to, he decided. The nurse hadn't said to. But maybe she assumed he knew. Or maybe she'd told him and he'd forgotten. A hospital gown sat folded on the exam table -- did that mean something? It was stupid, but he was getting fucked up about it; somehow the decision seemed of utmost importance. 

Instead he just sat on the edge of the table and waited.

Dr. Gervais appeared at last, a vigorous young guy in a turtleneck who looked a bit like Thom Yorke, minus the lazy eye. He also had a fucking soulpatch, which knocked a few points off. Despite his name, he was English.

"Joel? I'm Mark, pleased to meet you. So Margo Stein sent you over, eh? This is really cool, I'm glad you could come in. Looks like you've tried the whole chemistry set."

"Just about. The Klonopin was kinda keeping everything else afloat for awhile. I'm not sure it's doing much anymore."

"Aha. Yeah, that happens. Well, we'll see if the secret weapon will work on you, shall we? Do you mind getting undressed for me?"

After an abbreviated version of the usual neurological examination, Dr. Gervais asked Joel about his powers. "Do you ever lose control of them?"

"Almost never, anymore. Like I'll slip and go under a bit--" He demonstrated, letting himself go fuzzy at the edges. "But not total sensory deprivation stuff. Hardly ever, anyhow."

Dr. Gervais nodded. "What about when you do? What kind of thing triggers it?"

"If I'm really upset. And even then, I don't fall under for days and days like I used to."

"Really, you could go that long? Without eating or sleeping?"

"I'm pretty sick when I get back, but yeah."

"That's so neat." He made a note. "Sorry, I don't mean to come off like I'm objectifying or anything, it's just -- mutations are amazing, I never get over it. Okay, so you're apparently building up a tolerance to the Klonopin, which was your stopgap anti-convulsant, yeah? We don't like to use that class of drugs as a long-term measure, just doesn't work well. There's addiction issues, the tolerance thing, and the side effects make you pretty dozy, don't they? We need something that will work without turning you into a zombie. Do you get cognitive problems on the Topamax? I see from the chart you're in school."

"I don't think I'll be going back this term. Just...too tired. Um, I don't think I'm having cognitive stuff, though. I only have trouble thinking when I'm post-ictal. But I've had memory problems ever since the meningitis."

"Which is normal, yup. Not _good_ , but it's normal. And Margo Stein said you tolerated Keppra well as far as side effects, but it wasn't effective in preventing seizures. Right?"

"Yeah."

"Good, that's encouraging. I assume Margo's talked to you about what we do at Neurocherche?"

"She said you were doing a clinical trial for some epilepsy treatment," Joel said. "Like a nerve stimulator or something."

"Or something. Yes. My group is running a phase III trial on a neurostimulator designed for mutants. You appear to be a good candidate for it -- so far it's worked really well on mutants with psi and molecular powers, for reasons that aren't well-understood. It's very low-risk, just the usual concerns around surgery..."

He went on, talking about percentages of patients who responded, about the treatment's additional effectiveness on depression, about how the risk of permanent damage was minimal. "It's like a standard VNS, nothing weird there. We implant the stimulator just below your collarbone, under the skin, and the wires follow the vagus nerve in the neck. We also put another implant inside the skull, and we follow up with a drug treatment that has excellent effects on mutants. So far, anyway. Knock on wood. Even patients who continue to have seizures, the memory loss and confusion afterwards is reduced to almost nothing."

"That sounds pretty good." Joel had read most of this stuff already; Dr. Stein had given him stacks of literature to read, including articles from medical journals that were way over his head. Even Paul hadn't had much luck making sense of them, but the abstracts suggested that Dr. Gervais's work really was getting results from mutants with depression and epilepsy.

"Getting approval for any studies on mutants is unbelievable," said Dr. Gervais. "You have no idea. I see tons of kids from all across the country who want in on this study, and ethically, because we're talking about invasive surgery, I can only accept the ones who have a good chance of responding -- physical mutants just don't benefit from our technology. And physical mutants are most likely to suffer from refractive depression! The VNS might work for them as a last resort, but not Neurocherche's combo therapy. I wish we could help more people, but...what can you do?"

"I know."

"So what do you think? Don't feel like you have to answer right away."

Despite his soulpatch, Dr. Gervais had won Joel over. "I'm pretty sure I want the surgery, yeah."

"Amazing, that's great. I'd like to do a few tests at Neurocherche, just to be sure. An MRI, an EEG, some assorted pen and paper tests, a psi-scan. Probably run to about seven, eight hundred. Insurance should cover some of those costs, but is that a problem financially?"

 _Yes, I'm living in voluntary poverty (in theory, anyway) and am not supposed to be spending vast amounts of money on health care that most people in the province couldn't afford._ That was the right answer, but Joel said, "No, it's fine."

"Beauty. How soon can you get up to Repentigny after Christmas? I wish we could do tests in the city, but we really need our own lab."

"Anytime. After the twenty-eighth is best, I guess."

Dr. Gervais filled out an appointment card and handed it to him. "Bring that to the desk and they'll set you up with a time. Any more questions?"

Surely there were some, but he couldn't think of any. Nothing beyond a wordless -- no, fear, it was fear. And he wasn't like Paul, whose intuitions about people were so accurate; Joel's fears rarely panned out to anything. He wanted this, badly wanted it, desperate to get his seizures under control. And maybe this would be it, the treatment that finally got him ahead of the game instead of constantly playing catch-up with his own brain. _It's not so unreasonable that things might work out._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Corporal Heather McNeil is smushed together from Heather Hudson (née McNeil) and Snowbird's human alter ego Corporal Anne McKenzie. I love Heather, but her origin as the secretary at Jim's company seemed kinda boring to me, and I wanted someone with a straight-up RCMP background on Department H. The less said about Snowbird the better, but it was handy to the plot sometimes in the comics that she was on the Force.
> 
> A little extra commentary [here](http://famacneil.tumblr.com/post/122551447441/next-chapter-of-the-hearts-landscape-is).


	5. The Darkest Midnight

_Moralists advise us all to avoid violence, of course,_  
_but only insofar as this is possible. They authorize us,_  
_at least tacitly, to reply to obvious provocations_  
_by the measured counterviolence that I described earlier,_  
_and which seems to us always justified._  
—René Girard

Christmas wasn't much of a party at St. John of God House, or at least Prawn didn't think so. He had been around for two years, off and on, and he usually tried to find somewhere else to be during the holidays. He had a few friends in the city who would let him couch-surf for limited periods so long as he fixed their broken electronics and didn't bring the cops around. Getting dragged into safety under an S3 designation had put him right out of a partying mood, though, and nobody else was enthusiastic about having him under their roof.

So Prawn was at the house after all, and realising that the subdued feeling of Christmas at St. John's was actually because it _was_ personal for Joel and Paul, not because it wasn't. On Halloween they all carved pumpkins and on Canada Day there were flags and bottle rockets, but they didn't do Christmas in the same paint-by-numbers way. Paul had vetoed Christmas music in the house and Joel was picky about putting up lights before Advent began, but there was a real, aromatic tree in the front room, festooned with the kind of oddly mismatched ornaments that only came from family. Blown-glass reflector ornaments with their geode-like conical cavities, a few of which were broken inside but hung up anyway on the upper branches. Little sequined cardboard angels with pipecleaner arms. Sheep made out of hardened white clay. Birds with spun-glass tails. A doll made of corn-husks. Plastic apples. A bristol board star streaked with glue and glitter, with Paul's name on the back in child's handwriting: whoever had made it had given up on writing his last name, and just wrote an L with a long zigzag to represent other letters. Maybe it had been Paul himself, when he was too young to be able to manage his own surname.

Everything was like that in the house, an accumulation of traditions and time, especially with the food. Paul made tourtières, flaky meat pies with a subtle bite of clove in the filling of ground pork and beef. Tins of buttery shortbread arrived from Joel's relatives in Ottawa, along with mincemeat tarts and dense brandy-soaked fruitcakes wrapped in cheesecloth. Every few days Paul brought home a spongy, thickly-iced bûche de Noël cake from the grocery store -- apparently the low quality of the cake was part of the appeal. During Hanukkah they bought jelly donuts from the Jewish bakeries in the city. 

It seemed like a lot, but everything went fast. They began to put out two breakfasts every morning, one early and simple for kids who had to get out to school or work, and one that was more like brunch for people who could wait but wanted more food. The little Christmas delicacies like the tourtières and the fruitcakes disappeared like silk set on fire. 

Everyone took shifts in the kitchen, but Christmas Eve was still a big deal, and Paul was clearly getting stressed out about the cooking. Prawn and a few of the others were watching _It's a Wonderful Life_ in the living room when Paul came out of the kitchen. "All right, listen up, I need mushrooms and I need them now. It's a mushroom emergency. Prawn, I'm entrusting you with this task and I want you to take it very seriously. Can I count on you to follow a shopping list? Will you go with all due speed and waste no time in this matter?"

"Can it wait until Jimmy Stewart tries to top himself?"

"No, Prawn, it can't. You're off the mushroom project and demoted to chauffeur. You get to drive fast and play the radio, so it's ideal for you. Aurora, you look like you appreciate good mushrooms. And baking powder. You understand the time-sensitive nature of getting the baking powder in place? Good. Step into the kitchen as I tell you about my mushroom needs."

Unfortunately, the Christmas Eve traffic was thick and Prawn didn't get to drive nearly as fast as he wanted to. Aurora was in a playful mood -- she'd loosened up a lot since she first came to the house, and Prawn had concluded that she wasn't actually all that religious after all. Or maybe she had been but she wasn't now; he didn't know, but he found it refreshing.

"What is this? I love it," she said as they drove, tapping the stereo. "Have I heard this before?"

"Uh, it's Jay Z, you've definitely heard him before."

"You'd be surprised. Not allowed in the nunnery."

"You were singing along with that M.I.A. song that was on a minute ago. Your story's full of plot holes, you know that?" Prawn said with a smile. He wanted to roll down the windows, even though it was cold as a witch's tit, just because he felt awesome about driving around with a hot French brunette on Christmas Eve. "Bad Catholic schoolgirl running away to dance in the clubs, then she fucks up by not knowing the one Jay Z song that everyone knows. You're lucky you're cute."

"Oh, I got a compliment out of you, that's amazing. I'll commission an artist to depict this heroic moment, hang it up on my mantel." It was utterly dry, but she was smiling. "Do you smoke?"

"Me, no. Everyone else I've ever bloody met on the street smokes like a chimney, but I just...I don't." The traffic ahead cleared a bit, and Prawn revved the engine, passing a slow Chrysler with Ontario plates and making the rosary on the rearview mirror swing. A dark blue sedan appeared behind him. "That fucking guy's been behind me all the way from Sainte Famille. Yeah, um, my mam died of lung cancer, so. She didn't even smoke, she just used to work at a pub where the walls were fuckin' yellow and the air was blue, so it caught up with her. And she hated the smell and so did I, because she hated it, so I never started. Why, were you asking because you want to pick up a pack or something?"

"No, I don't either," Aurora said. "I was just curious. Like you said, most kids in the street seem to smoke already, and it's Quebec. I'm sorry about your mother."

"It's fine. Long time ago."

"It doesn't matter how long ago. It's your mother. I never knew mine, I was too young," she said, looking out her window at the passing cars. "But I have my brother again, sort of."

"That's the kind of coincidence that scares the shit out of me. Like I expect to see Oprah show up with cameras. --Sorry, I gotta ditch this fucker," Prawn said. The tailgater was still there. He hated having people close behind him, so he sped up to 80, hoping to make the light before it changed and leave the tailgater behind. The light hit red just before he burned through.

Aurora jerked in her seat as he slowed again, laughing. "You're the worst driver I've ever seen -- I'm not going to listen to any more jokes about French drivers, okay? Brits are officially the worst." 

"No, I'm an exception. The French are still on the hook."

"Well, you're the only English-boy-from-England I've ever met, so you have to carry the weight of being an ambassador. Can I ask you something?" she added. "Why do they call you Prawn?"

"Everybody asks that. But I don't have a good story," he said. "Hand to God, I don't remember. It's probably some had-to-be-there joke that happened while I was high, but my real name's rubbish so from there I had nowhere to go but up."

"It's nothing to do with your mutation? What do you even do? I asked Arlette earlier and she was a bit vague," Aurora said, turned in her seat now to watch his face. "Or should I not ask?"

"Well, it's not a secret," said Prawn, although the question always did make him feel a little awkward. Once people understood the explanation of his power, they usually got nervous. "I can sense and manipulate electromagnetic radiation, so gamma rays, X-rays, microwaves, radio, like that."

Aurora took a few seconds to work through that information. "So should I get one of those lead aprons to wear around you or what? No, I shouldn't tease you, but -- wow."

"It's not that big a deal. I don't have any control issues, I'm not gonna accidentally fry your ovaries or anything," he said. "My CRIM card has some kind of internal flag on it, because I always get extra shit after they scan it, but I don't break stuff or hurt people. I try really hard. All the time."

"It's all right," she said, smiling at him as he parked outside the grocery store. "I'm not worried. My ovaries are safe with you."

Prawn had practically forgotten the red light when they got out at Provigo. Aurora was rooting around in her purse for the shopping list while he was bent over the seat as he strained to reach an English newspaper that some thoughtful soul had left in the back. He had the papers in hand when he spotted a large blond man in a cheap suit paired with a red flannel shirt, headed straight for them -- the tailgater.

"Christ," Prawn muttered, not wanting to deal with some cunt's road rage on Christmas Eve. He hadn't even flipped the guy off.

The man knocked on the window, and Prawn rolled it down. "Look, mate, I didn't--"

"You Francis Dudley?"

 _Shit shit shit a cop oh shit_ "Yeah."

"Can I see your CRIM card, please?" The man held up ID. Prawn glimpsed the RCMP crest. Fuck. "Yours too, Miss Beaubier."

"Hang on, I ran a red light, that's not a federal...thing, is it?" Red lights were provincial, because in Ontario you could turn right on one. Yeah. _Seems legit._

"Come on, Dudley, I don't want to have to bring you to Mile End. Again."

Prawn gave a very put-upon sigh, as if that would convince anyone of anything, and got out his card. "My friend doesn't have one yet."

"Does she have preliminary papers?"

"At home."

"Get out of the car, please."

Prawn got out. The car was still running, Jay Z on the stereo, which was really sending out all the wrong signals right now. _Aren't you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something, somebody important or something?_ "We're going to Mile End anyway, aren't we?"

"No, Dudley, not necessarily. We're going to Starbucks for a chat. That okay with you?"

"We have to buy mushrooms and baking powder."

"You can do that after. Nobody wants to drag this out. Hell, it's Christmas Eve, right?" The big man grinned and led Prawn around the back of the car, one heavy hand on his back. "Miss Beaubier, please join us. Coffee's on the taxpayer."

Starbucks was closed, but they drove around in the blue sedan until they found a café that was open. The cop ordered a decaf latte, to Prawn's disgust.

Sitting down, Prawn said, "So the Mounties are doing traffic violations now?"

The man slid his ID across the table to Prawn and Aurora. "Take a close look at that, okay? Walter Langkowski, Special Division. We're _affiliated_ with the RCMP for now, but I'm not an officer. I'm a physicist. Couldn't give you a ticket if I wanted to."

"But you could toss us in Mile End, couldn't you?"

"That's not hard, Dudley. S3 detainee breaking the law in broad daylight, in the company of a mutant without papers? Justin Bieber could throw your ass in safety with a citizen's arrest. I don't want to do that, but just keep the possibility at the back of your mind. Now, I don't want to spoil Paul Laliberté's Christmas dinner, which I'm sure is _fabulous_ ," Langkowski said with a jazz-hand gesture. "So I'll be quick. You're a talented pair, the two of you, and the government is willing to pay very handsomely for your services."

Neither Prawn nor Aurora said anything. They'd theorised about stuff like this, at the house, and Prawn had thought it was all paranoia and wishful thinking in one crazy package.

"If you want hard numbers, it's ninety-six thou a year. Before taxes, anyway. And instant citizenship for our crustacean friend here, as a bonus."

"And how long am I stuck here?" Prawn asked.

"The true north strong and free not good enough for you? Three-year contract, my dear dendrobranchiate. This is the real land of opportunity and you'll have a chance to get a very painless high school diploma and a gold-plated nest egg in that time. Criminal records sealed if you serve out your contract with no difficulties. Satisfaction guaranteed or we ship you back to Mother England. Better than sleeping in a convenience store, right? Are we interested yet?" He opened a briefcase and handed them each a thick document in a red plastic binder. "You can read as much of that as you want while you're here, but for security reasons you can't take a copy with you. Eyes only. We want you for our special operations team, which we're calling Department H for now..."

Prawn half-listened and half-read, quickly becoming lost in the legal jargon. It couldn't possibly be as James Bond as it sounded, he thought -- if Langkowski was any indication, the job consisted of driving around in a rubbish car and drinking fairy-piss Starbucks coffee, much like other people in government jobs. "I don't have to be bilingual, right?"

"Nope."

"Is there a good dental plan? My teeth are a fucking nightmare."

"Yeah? I chipped my front two playing football in high school," Langkowski said, smiling and tapping his incisors. "Check it out. You'd never know."

Prawn looked at Aurora. "What do you think?"

Langkowski turned to her, ignoring Prawn's question. "Jim Hudson himself spoke to your twin brother a couple of days ago."

"I'd be with Jean-Paul?"

"Absolutely. You're a matched set, the two of you. From what we can tell based on the DNA tests, your mutation and his work better when you're paired, and there might be other stuff that kicks in when you're together as well."

"Well...I don't like the idea of a contract," she said, but she sounded like she was wavering.

"You would sign after training, which you're paid for. Six weeks."

"Here in Montreal?"

"Ottawa. All moving and housing expenses paid."

She bit her lip for a moment, then said, "I want in."

The money had already convinced Prawn. "Me too."

"Welcome to the team," said Langkowski.

* * *

Paul was fuming. "Prawn had better be dead or in safety, I swear to God."

"Is your next line 'dinner is _ruined_ '? Relax." Joel was setting the third table in the west sitting room. "They're fine."

"What are you basing that on?"

"I'm basing it on shut up and don't ruin Christmas, Paul."

"Now who's uptight? Take your dinner meds. So who wants to succeed where Prawn has failed?" Paul addressed the kids on the couch. "Nour? Faithful, dependable Nour?"

Nour groaned and got up. "I'm not going all the way up to the Plateau. You're getting IGA mushrooms."

"I don't care about the mushrooms anymore. They're dead to me. I just want my baking powder. I want to make my biscuits and serve you bastards."

Paul had brought this on himself, Joel thought -- there were thirty kids in the house, between the dining room and the sitting room, and they'd been cooking for two days straight. But Paul insisted on roasting the three geese himself, claiming some special expertise in the matter that he wasn't willing to share. Joel wasn't all that into it, because he was used to light fare on Christmas Eve, usually fishcakes and peas before Midnight Mass, with the bigger dinner taking place on the 25th. But since other shelters in the city were mostly doing dinners on Christmas Day they thought it was good to diversify.

"There's not going to be enough," Joel said from the kitchen doorway. "What do you want to do?"

"Will you leave me alone? There's plenty of food, just not enough meat. Everyone take a bit less, it'll be fine."

"It's not your fault, but like...people expect a main dish at Christmas dinner. Why don't I order something in to bulk it up?"

Paul glared at him, and then said, "Yeah, all right. I didn't think they'd cook down so much. They always looked huge when mémère did them."

"They smell great."

Paul grunted, as a lid on the stove started to chitter, and Joel went back to the east sitting room to collect opinions on Chinese vs. Indian. He was on his way to the dining room when the front door opened and Prawn and Aurora appeared, stamping snow off their boots and looking guilty.

"Where were you?" Joel demanded. "Does it take two hours to go to Provigo?"

"We need to talk to you," said Prawn, far too seriously for Joel's liking.

"Uh...all right, come on." They went into the office and closed the door. Aurora sat next to Prawn on the Naugahyde couch.

Prawn started. "This car was following us..."

"Following you."

"I think so. It could have been a coincidence, maybe. But it looked like he was following us."

"From where?"

"From here. Sainte Famille Street. I ran a red light..."

Joel didn't know whether to believe the story or not, since it sounded like Prawn's usual bullshit. But he hadn't come home with a ticket, and Jeanne-Marie wouldn't lie for someone else. When he heard about Department H, he knew. "Aw, _Christ._ Not again. What did you tell them?"

Prawn and Jeanne-Marie looked at each other; she answered. "We were interested."

Stupid for it to feel like such a betrayal. Joel had never insisted very hard on the isms of the Catholic Worker, leery of pressing beliefs and opinions on other people. He'd still hoped that the movement's values would seep into everything by osmosis, but in reality he knew that half the house's core staff barely knew who Dorothy Day was. Paul, Grace, and Nour came closest to believing in the same things Joel did, and even there, he was afraid to talk about it too much -- as if he'd dissuade them from it with his own enthusiasm. "You were interested."

Prawn sensed Joel's disapproval. "It's ninety-six thou a year, man. And free housing."

"Well, I can't offer you ninety-six thou a year," said Joel, "but you already have free housing. Whatever else you want..."

"I want a job and a place of my own, Joel," Prawn said, more quietly. "I know I've fucked up a lot of the jobs you found me, but I'm not daft. A government job is too good to pass up."

"Yeah, but what's the job?"

They looked at each other. Jeanne-Marie said, "It's special forces work, associated with the RCMP. Walter said it was 'dealing with threats against the public order.'"

"So they're using mutants to take down other mutants. You guys honestly like the sound of that?"

"It doesn't sound so different from the X-Men," said Prawn.

It didn't, and the only difference Joel could think of was that the X-Men were independent of the government -- the very fact that had made the Prime Minister so cautious about trusting them to rescue Joel's father. The X-Men weren't accountable to anyone, but a team controlled by a hostile government had to be worse, didn't it? When had Joel started thinking of his own government as hostile?

"Anyway," said Prawn, sounding defensive, "who says the threats have to be mutants? What's wrong with the idea of using our powers to protect people from other things? Hurricanes, earthquakes, terrorism? I might have got some gratitude for warning people about the explosion on Victoria Avenue if I'd been someone official and not some random mutant chav sleeping in a dépanneur."

"That's a military thing, though, the Mounties don't do disaster relief," Joel said. He was running out of ammunition and Prawn knew it.

"It's not the Mounties. They'll be their own department when everything gets sorted, Langkowski said."

Out of ideas, Joel opened his desk drawer and took out his chequebook. "Prawn, name a number high enough to make you stay away from this."

He'd succeeded in rattling Jeanne-Marie, who was biting her lip. Prawn's eyes widened, but he remained unmoved. "You fucking serious? Name a _number_? Ninety-six thou plus housing and dental coverage, that's the fucking number."

"I can get you to a dentist."

"That's a start. Keep going."

There was a poster on the far wall of St. Clare of Assisi, barefoot in her poor grey robes, the scenes of her conversion, life, and death arrayed around her. Clare wouldn't have compromised, Joel thought, and she wouldn't have held back, either. She wouldn't have held back a single thing. That made the decision easy -- maybe easier than it should have been. Joel got his phone out and pressed his thumbprint to the button to open his bank's app, checking the balance. "All right, Prawn. I have...one sec...fourteen five twenty-six in my account right now. That's our operating budget until the spring. It's yours."

"Yeah, I get it, you're trying to make a point," Prawn said impatiently. "But you're not actually going to--"

"Just watch me." Joel made the cheque out to Francis Dudley, $14,526 from the Desjardins credit union, and signed it. Prawn did not react until Joel tore the cheque off and handed it to him.

"You're not fucking serious."

"Dead serious."

"What are you going to use to run the house?"

Joel shrugged. "Cash some bonds, I guess. I'll figure something out."

"You're bluffing," Prawn said, but he took the cheque, read it carefully as if he suspected fraud. "I'm cashing this, you know. I'm not giving it back to you out of shame."

"You don't have to. It's yours, do whatever you want with it. Get an apartment and a new wardrobe, anything you want. Just don't go with these people." Joel knew he was walking a fine line between benefactor and lunatic, and there was a chance Prawn would tear up the cheque and declare that he'd work for Ottawa just to get away from them. _Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness._ But Joel didn't think Prawn would actually leave. The immediate lure of free money would outweigh the delayed gratification of working a potentially dangerous job in another city.

"You're mad," said Prawn in a curiously slack voice. He did not look up from the cheque. "I've never held this much money in my hands before."

Joel saw that he was wrong, it wasn't the money that had convinced Prawn. And Prawn was indeed convinced. Whether that was a good or a bad thing, he wasn't sure yet. "Well, merry Christmas."

"Uh. Thanks. Thank you." Prawn stuffed the cheque in his pocket and stood up awkwardly, smoothing the front of his pants down with his hands. "Excuse me."

He bolted. Jeanne-Marie winced sympathetically as Prawn went out, and said to Joel, "So what are you going to offer me? Blood?"

"If that'd make a difference, I've got a letter opener right here," Joel said, scrubbing a hand over his face. "No, I was hoping you'd listen to reason."

"You worry too much, English boy," she said. "You're being too hard on these government people. I want to work with my brother and I want a real job, a real life. And you can't pay off everybody, and I'm not your top priority -- that's fine, I know why. Prawn could do a lot of damage, I understand that. But that doesn't mean he will. That doesn't even mean this Department H will ask him to. Famous last words, but how bad could they be? How bad can anything be, compared with what we have?" She smiled at him as she got up to leave the office. "I'll go help serve. But I'm looking forward to this. I've never been to Ottawa."

When she was gone, Joel replayed the conversation in his head a few times, wondering if he could have won them both somehow. If there was a way, he didn't see it -- Aurora really wasn't interested in money, he didn't think. What she wanted was her brother, and Joel hadn't even heard back from Jean-Paul since the night of the Victoria Avenue earthquake.

There was a chance, he thought, that Aurora was right about Department H. Or maybe he was paranoid. For a moment, Joel played with the notion, searching his memory for other troubling incidents. Lags and space-outs from the epilepsy, yes. He'd snapped at Paul a couple of times, but Paul had snapped too; it was Christmas and they were stressed out. They weren't really upset at each other. When he was alone and undistracted, the bad feelings would break over him in waves, each a few seconds long, powerful enough to make him clench his teeth and wish for nonexistence, but they didn't touch him when Paul was there, when he had a book to read, when he was before the Sacrament at Saint-Sulpice. Nine hours a night of sleep, meals were regular. Maybe his judgement was off, but Joel didn't think he could blame that on his brain chemistry.

He needed more information. Looking over the scurf on his desk, he found Corporal McNeil's card and dialled the number. Yes, it was Christmas Eve, but she would have voicemail, and he had to leave voicemail messages whenever he was sufficiently psyched up to do it; he hated the phone.

There was a distant buzz on the other end of the line, but no recording or human voice. He was about to hang up and try again when he heard a click and a bored switchboard operator's voice. "Government of Canada, Special Operations," she announced in English and French. "Please give your name and the name of the person you are attempting to reach."

"Joel McCree, calling for, uh, Heather McNeil, please."

A pause. "One moment, please."

_Your call is being forwarded._

Two rings. "Hello?"

He hung up in a sudden panic. No, he needed to think about this. Niko, Kyle, Prawn, and the Beaubiers needed something more than paranoid raving or fumbling, tactful confrontations that ended in compromise. They needed an advocate.

Impulsively, he picked up the phone again and dialled Dr. Xavier's office number, again intending to leave a message. He wasn't expecting the Professor to pick up at six o'clock on Christmas Eve, but after three rings he did. "Charles Xavier here."

Didn't anyone take the holidays off anymore? Joel was thrown. "Oh -- um, hello, sir. It's Joel McCree, I didn't know if--"

"Joel!" The Professor actually sounded happy to hear from him. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas, sir. Uh...I don't want to take up too much of your time. I'll call back."

"No, no." A creak in the background as if the Professor were settling back in his chair. "We're waiting to have a late supper when Jean gets off her shift at nine. I just came in here to put something away and the phone was ringing. I meant to call last week when I heard that there was mutant involvement in the earthquake up there. I hope no one you know was hurt?"

"Not hurt, no. A couple of my guys were there on the scene and got picked up by the cops, but we got them out again."

"I'm glad to hear that. Is anything known about the child who caused it? If you're short of space up there you can always feel free to direct them to Westchester, you know."

"No, yeah, I would, but it didn't actually come up. We've kinda got another group up here that's headhunting mutants, I think." Joel told him about Department H, and reluctantly mentioned that he'd spied on the girl in the hospital.

"Ah," said Dr. Xavier, no judgement in his voice.

"I've never done it before. Not deliberately."

"I believe you."

"I wouldn't do it if I weren't worried about what these Department H guys are doing."

The Professor took a moment to consider that. "Do you think they'll be exploitative, or are you more troubled by the idea of their using physical force at all?"

"You don't think there's something weird about this?"

"I'm asking what you think. Ottawa to me is a bit like the German language, you know, full of things that seem familiar but don't have the same meaning. You have different expectations for public life. 'Peace, order, and good government,' as you say."

"Well, like I said. I'm worried. I don't know what exactly I think they're doing, but it...we don't _do_ that kind of thing here. It sounds bizarre."

"Perhaps, at first. There are organisations of mutants who work for governments around the world. Some are secretive, some aren't. Not all of them are sinister or cruel. Until you know the leadership of this group, it's hard to say what they might do."

The leadership was the government of Canada, but Joel knew that wasn't much of an answer. The official policy towards mutants might mean very little when dealing with an internal mutant security force. The government was not a monolith with only one opinion. "Maybe."

"You remember we talked about fortune-telling and mind-reading, the ways a depressed mind convinces itself that the world is dangerous, pointless, unwelcoming?"

Joel was embarrassed. "You don't need to...you know, start therapy procedures like that. I just called for, um, advice, I guess. I know therapists don't give advice."

"But friends do," the Professor said quietly. "You haven't been my patient for years now, but I hope 'friend' remains an accurate term. I only wish I had something more to offer. If you're right and Department H does mean you harm, perhaps all you can do is be prepared. You might lay in some emergency supplies and make some contacts in other provinces. Or here in the U.S. Your children are welcome at the mansion if they need to go that far."

"Thank you," said Joel, gratitude making the words seem small and insignificant. He hadn't considered fleeing the country; his worst-case scenarios usually ended in the Gulag, starvation on the Prime Minister's doorstep, decapitation in Rome, crucifixion upside-down. Leaving was probably wiser.

"Once you are prepared, try to relax. I doubt that things are as bleak as you think. Only five years ago your country was well ahead of ours in recognition of the basic humanity of mutants, and I don't believe that a mere change of ruling parties and a constitutional amendment can change the hearts and minds of millions of people. Not in that length of time."

"You really think it might be all right?"

"'Might be' is a good phrase. Yes. I'll admit I don't like their tactics so far -- they ought to have some respect for your privacy and not go accosting you in hospital and on the street. But they are a new organisation, and you mentioned that Langkowski is not a police officer by training. They may be dealing with inexperienced agents who don't realise how ham-fisted they appear. Besides," he admitted ruefully, "I'm afraid we have recruited students and X-Men using tactics that you might find invasive or inappropriate. Sometimes it is the only way. Sometimes they might not realise there are other options. 'Violence is a failure of the imagination,' as William Stafford said."

Joel hummed noncommittally, and the Professor added, "How is your health, speaking of the hospital? I'm sorry I didn't ask earlier."

"It's been pretty bad," Joel said, barely above a whisper, something he'd been reluctant to say out loud. Now, alone in the room, he could admit it into the phone. "Lots of seizures. Really messy ones, TC's and absences both. I've been drugged up on lots of benzos."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Are you getting help?"

"Paul's been amazing, he's so good I feel guilty. Ha ha, of course I feel guilty, right?" Joel added with some self-directed sarcasm. "Some things never change. But yeah, my neurologist got me to see this mutant brain specialist she knows, Mark Gervais."

"From Neurocherche? That's wonderful. Gervais is supposed to be quite brilliant. The studies of his that I read in the journals were impressive."

That sounded more encouraging than Joel had expected. "He's okay?"

"More than okay. I'm not a medical doctor, as you know, so it's difficult for me to judge his science, but what impressed me was the way he wrote about his mutant patients. He has a healthy curiosity and a human compassion for them, rather than fear or pity."

"And the surgery itself? An implant inside the skull..."

The Professor chuckled. "Well, it's not a mind-control device, if that's a concern. Human minds are a bit more complex than that, and the implant is a glorified pacemaker. But I can appreciate that it's a serious surgery. I can have Henry email you on the subject if you like."

Joel felt stupid, embarrassed that he was taking up the Professor's time with his dumb bullshit. "That's okay, you don't have to bug him. It's no big deal. I should let you go, anyhow. Paul will kill me if I hold up dinner any longer."

"Give everyone my regards -- I'm sure everyone at the mansion would say the same. And I hope your holidays are restful."

"You too. Merry Christmas, sir," said Joel again, and hung up.

In the kitchen, Paul was carving the first goose, Nour making a hash of the second one's wing. Joel didn't like to bother a cook in the kitchen, but he said, "If you carve at the table people will have a better chance of getting it before it's cold."

"You know how to carve a goose?" Nour was wearing an incongruous lime-green barbecue apron, dusted with flour.

"Birds are all the same, yeah."

"Okay, then, this just became your job." Nour stepped aside and handed over the knife. Paul hoisted his bird onto a platter, and they brought the geese into the dining room, to a round of ironic applause.

The room was crowded to the corners, the extra leaves set in the table to seat sixteen. More were in the sitting room, at card tables and on the floor, and they came into the dining room to stand around the big table. Joel recognised a couple of kids who he knew had homes and families to go to; holidays were difficult for too many of them. Grace was keeping charge of the wine bottles, being strict about it, but several of the kids already looked a bit merry.

"In the name of the Father..."

Joel made a point of not subjecting the kids to too much prayer, as he thought it would have the opposite of the desired effect. Most of them distrusted religion, and a handful hated it, although generally the ones with strong opinions stayed away from the house. No one had to pray or go to Mass as a condition for staying at the house; the thought of that grossed Joel out and was inimical to the Catholic Worker spirit. But he did say grace at the table, and no one had to acknowledge it with bowed heads or Amens if they didn't want to. He still felt awkward doing it. _It's thirty seconds, just fucking say it._

  
_The blessing of the five loaves and two fishes_  
_that God shared with the five thousand,_  
_and the bounty of the King who made the sharing_  
_come upon our food and all who share it;_  
_and if there be any poor creature hungry or thirsty_  
_walking along the road, send them into us_  
_that we can share the food with them,_  
_just as you share your gifts with all of us._  
_Amen._  


The grace was his father's invented prayer, merged from two traditional Irish blessings, which used to irritate Joel's grandmother, who was an amateur folklorist and a perfectionist. In the days when Joel was very young and had had friends to bring home from school for dinner, the grace seemed to both impress and embarrass them. Joel used to ask his father not to say it, with no success.

They ate, and it was good. Roast goose, potatoes Lyonnaise, turnip and parsnips and broccoli, four steaming tourtières, baby carrots, cranberry sauce, rice and chickpeas with the promised mushrooms, hot biscuits with butter, and chicken tikka masala with its accompanying arrays of Indian side dishes. None of it really went together, but it was right even so. To Joel's surprise, the kids didn't go back to the sitting room to eat, instead leaning on the sideboard with their plates in their hands, talking. Others sat on the floor by the radiator, plates in their laps. 

Paul, of course, was eating his usual evening meal of fried red locusts on a bed of silkworm pupae, ascetic compared with the rest of the spread. "Is the goose good?"

"It's perfect." Joel wasn't actually hungry, as he could never eat well when he was worried, but he enjoyed the look of the piles of food on his plate anyway, and the goose smelled rich and savoury. "You're an artist."

"I thought so," he said with satisfaction, crunching a locust in two with his fork. "That's mémère's recipe, she taught me. I can hardly eat anything normal now, but it's still nice to cook it. Having it in my hands, the smells of the herbs. Choosing the prettiest vegetables. I'm barely hungry at all after all that work, just tired. Wine?"

"I'm on meds, idiot."

"Come on, there's nothing sadder than a sober Irishman at Christmas. Just taste it, I won't let you actually get yourself in trouble here."

Joel gave in and had half a glass of wine, which (sadly) was enough to leave him feeling weird. Not drunk, just odd. He put the glass aside, worried about provoking more seizures. Conversation unfolded around him, nobody pushing him for talk but nobody excluding him either. Joel felt like a family ghost, or Elijah at a seder, present and welcome but still unnoticed. The hours passed in a pleasantly buttery haze until ten, when Joel and Paul collected the other few practicing Catholics in the house for Midnight Mass.

Freezing rain was falling, and the warm air was thick with fog. They walked with their hands on the limestone wall around the house, and then they leaned on each other, stepping carefully over the ice. Paul and Joel, Jeanne-Marie and Grace, Mars and Zizi. The plastic nativity scene outside Saint Sulpice was lit up from within, the kings in garish pink and green, a fringe of icicles hanging from the outstretched arms of the infant.

The church was crowded, but they managed to squeeze into Joel's usual pew under the tenth station of the cross at the side, moments before the congregation rustled to its feet and the organ sounded the first notes of _Adeste Fideles._

Joel had never been the most prayerful candidate for the Dominican novitiate, and lately he'd been letting even his lax standards fall slack. Advent had passed in a flurry of exams, doctor's appointments, and crises in the house; Christmas had fallen on them too swiftly. But now he felt a swell of joy, of welcome, a brim-full peace in his chest and his fingertips, something that quivered to overflowing. He crossed himself, fingers still wet from the font, and wondered if he would be able to stay standing in such a flood of happiness.

And then: bees.

* * *

Paul knew where to look for Joel when he was missing: basements, spare bedrooms, pantries and storerooms, public washrooms. Disused and ugly places that rarely merited a second glance from most people. The trick in searching him out was that you couldn't just look with your eyes. As Paul went through the church basement's many little rooms, he looked and listened and smelled, but mostly he imagined -- would Joel have taken refuge here?

It had to be a seizure; these days, disappearing during Mass was so out of character that it could have no other explanation. Was he not taking his meds, or not enough of them? Paul had struggled with lithium and Depakene long enough to know it was easy to convince yourself that effects didn't follow causes, that skipping one dose might not mean disaster, that the disease and the drug side effects might all dissipate like clouds. The Klonopin made Joel sleepy and laid-back, and even allowing for developing tolerance, he'd been too jittery lately.

Or maybe he just had a lot on his mind.

Or the third possibility, the one Paul liked the least: that the drugs simply weren't enough, that something was deteriorating, and no one knew what. Least of all Joel himself.

The washroom door was locked, naturally, but Paul had a feeling. He had to jimmy it open with his debit card, glancing around to make sure the priest or the janitor didn't catch him. When he got it open, he had a moment of blank terror as he saw Joel sprawled on the floor. But his head was pillowed on his coat, which meant he'd had time between the aura and the seizure to lie down instead of falling. That was good. The blood leaking from the corner of his mouth was more upsetting; Joel said he was used to chewing his tongue into hamburger, but Paul didn't believe him. A bitten tongue was the definition of adding insult to injury.

There were only rough paper towels to wipe away the blood, and Joel woke up when Paul touched him. He couldn't speak, but made an exasperated sound that was easily understood.

"I know, I know. You want to use the sink if I help you up? Rinse your mouth?"

Joel made another vague noise, but then nodded. It was strange being around him when he couldn't speak, Paul thought, but not actually _that_ weird. The same personality, just a very basic layer of it. Mostly it was just like dealing with someone who was taking a long time to wake up, as if coming out of an anaesthetic after surgery. Not so frightening. Paul helped him up and supported him as he bent over the sink and spat. 

After a few moments, Joel checked his temple in the mirror, evidently looking for bruises, and narrowed his eyes at the bathroom door. "We're where? Bonaventure?"

Public bathrooms all looked the same, but Paul didn't know why Joel would have guessed Bonaventure, of all places. He didn't think they'd ever even shopped there. "Church basement. Mass ended about twenty minutes ago, it's a little after twelve."

"Shit."

"You're okay, it's fine. Should I call us a taxi so we can get home?"

"No. Give me a minute." Then: "What time is it?"

"A little after twelve," Paul repeated. Sometimes Joel got obsessed with the time when he was post-ictal, but couldn't retain the information after asking the question. "Are you hurting?"

"No." Sometimes Joel answered every question with _no_ , which was actually better than an _I don't know_ day. When everything was _I don't know_ he seemed to take longer to come back, whereas a _no_ day meant he was fighting the fog harder. "Hurting, yeah. Just the...word..."

"Sore muscles?"

Joel nodded. "I didn't fall. Just sore. We're missing the Pope."

Missing the Pope's Mass or the Queen's Christmas Message meant a ruined Christmas in the McCree household, and Paul had learned to put up with these non-negotiables. "Nah, the Pope goes for a long time. We'll still see some of it."

"What time is it?" he asked again.

"Twelve-fifteen."

Joel spat into the sink again and ran the water, sluicing his mouth out. "Where are the others?"

"They went home on their own. It's fine."

"Sorry to disappear on you."

"Nah."

"I mean it."

Paul said, "Look, it's not that I want to see you less, but maybe you need to disappear more often. Like Dr. Stein told you to. Maybe you're getting worse because you're pushing yourself to be solid all the time and it's just...not natural for you. Right? Maybe."

Joel was visibly bracing himself against the edge of the sink. Visible in the mirror, there was a spot of scarlet in his left eye where some capillaries had burst. "I don't have time for that."

Paul knew the lie immediately. "That's not why."

"It's true."

"But it's not why."

Joel half-smiled, and faded slightly into the Aphanes, taking on the queasy partial transparency of a figure in a bad television reception, when the shapes from other channels are almost visible on the screen. He went to the door, moving just a little too quickly as he did in this state, with not quite enough friction. "Fine, so you're right, it feels better. Can we not go home just yet? Who'd be open at this hour? Tim's?"

"Sure." Paul picked up Joel's coat and held the doors open for appearance's sake as they went out. It was warm, and Paul found himself unbuttoning his own coat as they walked. The ice was melting to slush underfoot.

"I'm worried about you," Paul said after they had walked for several blocks in silence. "You already knew that."

"Yeah."

"Am I right to be?"

Joel didn't answer for a few moments. "You're right to be worried, I guess. Stuff's going on."

"Like?"

"I found out where Niko is. Who she's working for. Some new government department is using mutant agents. Kyle's there too, and they snapped up Jean-Paul real quick."

"Are you fucking serious?" said Paul, and then, "How long have you known that?"

"Since the hospital."

" _Câlisse de crisse._ Who told you?"

"You think I couldn't just ferret it out on my own?" Joel asked with a small smile.

"That's exactly what I think. Who was it?"

"Some RCMP officer. Trying to recruit me, of all people, and Jeanne-Marie. And _Prawn._ "

Prawn. That didn't surprise Paul, but it did make his innards go cold. There were dangerous mutants at the house, and Paul didn't really care about that, but Prawn's abilities were very strong and very destructive. "Holy fuck, Joel. We're in trouble. Or -- what did you tell them?"

"What d'you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

"Fuck's sake, Paul, I'm not a hypocrite. And I'm not dumb, either. I'm not going to spy for the mutant secret police."

Paul always liked Joel best in moments like these, when he was being impractical about some ethical question. "That's sweet, but what is _wrong_ with you? Have you ever even watched a movie? Don't you know an opportunity when you see one?"

"Oh, this should be good," Joel said. "What, I should have said yes? Pull some double agent routine? Movies, hell. We don't know the first thing about this shit. We're middle-class white kids and we're soft as a loaf of Dempster's, let's be real."

"Uh, _I'm_ a middle-class white kid," Paul corrected him. "You're an upper-class kid from a political family. No argument on the Dempster's bread, though."

"Well, so? I might know a bit about how politics works, but this isn't politics. This is the opposite of politics, it's something they're trying to keep quiet. It's not in the media, it's not out there for voters. Is it an open secret on the Hill or is it super classified? I don't know. My limited contacts and shitty social skills aren't going to help with this."

They had stopped at a light. Paul said quietly, "So what, you're going to keep mum and be an innocent Dominican novice instead of doing something about this?"

"No. Wait. No." Joel held up a hand, and became physical again. He almost immediately started shivering, and Paul handed over the coat. "No. I misspoke when I called it a secret police. I have no idea what this lot are going to be like. If I thought there was really a threat, one I could prove, I'd do something. You know I would. Second--" He paused, fumbling with his zipper. "I won't be with the Dominicans."

Paul took a few moments to let that settle. The light had changed, and they crossed the street. Joel faded back to partial invisibility. "How come?"

"They don't want me," he said shortly.

"Joel, come on. Don't be dramatic."

Rather unnecessarily, Joel put his hands in his pockets. They weren't heading towards a Tim Horton's at all -- at some point past the Main they'd started wandering towards the Carré St-Louis, the park in the pretty Victorian neighbourhood scratchy with bare tree branches. Joel lifted his chin out of his collar and said, "You were right all along. You know me too well, I guess. No, don't interrupt me, okay? They rejected me. They don't think I'm right for it. I'm not resilient enough, they said."

"I'm sorry," said Paul, and he meant it. He'd never understood Joel's weird desire to join the Dominicans, and suspected that Joel just wanted to be the kind of person who would. Rejection was easy enough to understand, though.

"Yeah. It's all right."

"What're you going to do, then?" He wouldn't have asked if the wound had still been fresh, but Joel had obviously had a few days to think about the news.

Joel shrugged. "I dunno. What I've been doing, I guess. At least until I get my experimental surgery and end up with irreparable brain damage."

"Morbid. I mean, are you staying on at l'Institut Pastorale?"

"Taking a semester off, I think."

"Oh. Good." It would be nice to have more help in the house.

"You never liked the whole business, I know."

"Like I said before, I never knew whether to like it or not," Paul said. "You wouldn't talk to me about it. Was I in love with the idea, no. I didn't know why you were trying to...like, what did you think you'd do about the house, if they _had_ accepted you? Close it down? Does the house become my responsibility? What?"

"Not you, necessarily. But everything has to have some kind of succession plan," said Joel, not meeting Paul's eyes. "Otherwise you end up with Founder's Syndrome, the whole thing falls apart when the person who started it leaves. And the house shouldn't be on any one person in the first place. We wanted it to belong to everybody."

"Right, I get that. But why force the issue of leaving?" Paul asked, and paused before venturing the next question. "Were you like...was it a disappointment--"

"I love it here," Joel interrupted, the words almost swallowed by his coat collar. "I love the house, I love it. I'm not disappointed."

The scent was clean, no trace of deception, just the soft mango sweetness of sincerity with a salt-wash of unexplained sadness. "Then what were you trying to do?" Paul said. "Where were you trying to go?"

For a few moments it seemed like Joel would leave the question unanswered, as he used to do when they were younger. Paul had never possessed that ability; he couldn't leave a question alone, no matter how little he wanted to address it. Couldn't let someone else have the last word, couldn't go without trying to make his case. But Joel clammed up easily, and when he opened up the words came slowly. "It's hard to explain. I felt safe, being in discernment. Other guys didn't, at all...whenever we went on retreats I was the only one not tearing my hair out with stress about family and sex with girls and, and everything. I felt _bulletproof._ "

Joel was weird about family and sex, but Paul didn't say so. He wanted to focus on the positive, at least on fucking Christmas Eve. Feeling safe was nice. "You don't have to explain to me."

"I do, though. I don't want you thinking...I don't know. I want you to get why I did it. I owe you that." Joel paused again, then went on, "I thought that if I had this...this outside credential, a vocation, that people would understand me better. It didn't work out like that."

"Understand what?"

"That running the house isn't just political to me. It's not about mutant rights, it's not about CRIM cards or the Gatineau Accords."

"Joel, you've been religious as long as I've known you," Paul said, a little baffled by this explanation. "Not always this much, but you always practiced. I know that you started feeling this stuff more intensely when your dad died, but...no, man, I never thought this was just something political to you. I know it runs deep."

"I'm not explaining well. It's not even really about my dad," said Joel. "I just felt like -- like I had to _exist_ harder. To be more in the world. Like my whole existence was guttering like a candle and I had to throw my whole weight into being myself. With a big gesture. I had to find some way of throwing everything away. The house is a gesture, but religious life is...a clearer gesture. Or so I thought. Turns out people understand the house a lot better than they understand the Dominicans."

"You're really off in outer space right now." Paul decided that this might be something he was simply incapable of understanding, something tied to Joel's mutation, the constant temptation to not exist at all. He wanted to ask if this meant the experiment was over, or if there would be other orders, other discernments, trips to chapterhouses and friaries until the question was settled. But he sensed that Joel didn't know the answers yet. So Paul just said, "I still don't get it. Or maybe I should say that I _think_ I do, but you might disagree. We talk past each other a lot about this, but just...that's okay. You know? We don't have to understand everything all the time. We just have to keep trying."

They walked on in silence up Sherbrooke, past the half-darkened shop windows with their blinking Christmas displays. The busy thoroughfare was quiet, taxis plashing through the deep puddles of slush as they prowled by. A sparse stream of night people were going home from the first late shift, but the sidewalk wasn't full enough that Joel's intangibility would be noticed. Even Paul's skin drew no second glances, late at night on a holiday.

"Is this what it was like for Quebec mutants before?" Joel asked. He'd switched to French. "Before the referendum?"

He said "before the referendum" but Paul knew he meant before the CFH had killed his father. The X-Men's bungling of the rescue had done far more to convince people that mutants were a destabilising force in the country than any of the constitutional bullshit that followed. "I think if all mutants were like us, it wouldn't have changed. Harmless and different. We like harmless and different, in this city. We let all these hipsters live here, right? But people started getting hurt. Like Victoria Avenue."

"People have a right not to get the street ripped out from under them," Joel observed.

"You're doing the Devil's Advocate thing, but you know what? Accidents happen. People don't have a right to never get in an accident, sorry. And anyway, putting people in safety centres doesn't undo whatever accident they caused."

"I know." He faded a bit more. "But it can't be too late. Even now. We can get back to how things used to be."

"You really believe that?"

"I do," he said firmly, although it sounded more like a ritual response than a conviction.

As they turned back up Rue Sainte Famille and headed for home, Paul said, "So okay, Department H is recruiting, that's already done. Prawn and Jeanne-Marie are leaving?"

Joel suddenly snorted with laughter. It had a touch of hysteria in it. "Not Prawn."

"Okay--"

"I should have mentioned this. I don't have enough time to talk with you anymore." He was still laughing, trying to stifle it. "You're going to be so mad..."

"What?"

"Prawn's not going because I bought him out. I gave him--" Another burst of laughter. "I gave him fourteen thousand dollars not to join."

Paul tried to visualise those words as numbers, but his mind stubbornly refused to believe it. "You gave him _what?"_

"Everything. I gave him everything."

They had reached the gate in the limestone wall that stood around St-Jean-de-Dieu, and Paul leaned against the gate to steady himself on the icy sidewalk. "Until March?"

Joel nodded, a hand over his mouth. "God, what's wrong with me? I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Paul. I should've told you first. We'll have the next payout in March. I have some stuff I can cash in or liquidate, whatever. Worst comes to worst, my mother will give us a loan, but it won't be that bad. I'll make it all right, I promise. But I had to do something."

"You are fucking unbelievable." And yet Paul believed him, somehow, that everything would be all right. The house and car were paid for, their credit was good, and Mrs. McCree would give them an earful but she wouldn't let the house fold. And more than that, Paul could smell something on Joel like the scent of a bog in summer, green and flowering and moist. It was over-the-top and extreme, but ultimately Paul was here because he believed in his friend's reckless gestures. "So we're gambling on Prawn, basically? Put it all on red?"

"In a way, I guess."

"Listen, you _should_ have told me first, and I'm not happy about that. It's Christmas and I don't want to be mad, but you should have told me. And I'm not sure this is even a great idea," Paul said. "What about Jeanne-Marie?"

"I didn't convince her." Joel had got his breath back. "Not yet. She wants to build a connection with her brother now that she found him, and I think...she thinks it'll be exciting. I can't just throw money at her to make Department H less alluring. And I can't protect her once she's gone."

"Can't you?" said Paul. "What if you went with her?"

"I told you--"

"No, I don't mean sign a contract with them. I mean...use your powers. Watch them."

Joel digested that in silence. Paul was half-afraid that he'd get an lecture about ethics and privacy, or maybe treason and national security. But instead he just said, "I can't be everywhere at once. And I'm tired. This is where I want to be."

"Yeah, well. This is where I want to be too," said Paul.

Joel nodded, plainly exhausted, and they went inside. The Pope's Mass was over, but they found the highlights on CNN and watched for a few minutes. Paul remembered watching JP II on TV in his childhood, the heart-in-mouth moments watching the old pontiff grip the lectern or shake as he elevated the Host. The new Pope seemed like a nice guy, but Paul had a vague distrust of him that he couldn't quite rationalise. Maybe it was just the knowledge that nice guys didn't make it to Rome.

Paul reached for the remote and saw that Joel had fallen asleep on the couch, mouth open, his breath making a sound like wind through a crack in the door. Fine. Paul muted the TV and lay back in the recliner, watching surgery on TLC and the fresh snow falling outside the window.


	6. The Name for Its Own Sake

_In a piazza in Rome, I once saw a woman waiting_  
_at a corner. I don't know how long_  
_she stood there, or whether the one who hadn't come_  
_did come in the end, or not. But after her death, God_  
_will gently pry open her head, as he always does,_  
_to look for the name of the one she truly loved._  
_And it won't be His name, it won't be His._  
— Yehuda Amichai

Neurocherche stood off the autoroute just outside of Repentigny, a squat and sprawling concrete building crouching behind the ditch-wheat and the massed pines that lined the road. The parking lot was full, even at seven-thirty in the middle of the dead week between Christmas and New Year's.

"We haven't been able to find the lesions we're looking for," Dr. Gervais told Joel in the office. "That doesn't mean they're not there, necessarily. Necessarily. But they're not showing up. I'm not going to give you another MRI -- it's a waste of money when we know what we're going to find."

"Could...could the seizures be psychogenic?" Joel asked, trying to help him by using the right term, not getting bitter and saying, _Are you saying I'm faking, are you saying I'm crazy?_ He'd read about psychogenic seizures, and they were his worst nightmare -- not because they implied mental illness ( _already got that sewn up_ ) but because they were even harder to treat.

"No. No, I don't think so," said Dr. Gervais. Good news for once. "You've had seizures while asleep, for one thing. Second, your partner had a couple of them recorded on his phone that he sent to me, and they look pretty textbook. Psychogenic non-epileptic seizures -- we call them PNES for short -- usually look like epilepsy to a layperson, but not to a doctor. There are certain movements and signs we look for, things that don't appear in the episodes a PNES patient has. Margo Stein never had any suspicion that your seizures are PNES, and I trust her judgement." 

"Okay. That's good. I think."

"It's good. PNES is tough to treat. Not that you're having a picnic with whatever you've got. So five years back..." Dr. Gervais flipped through a fat section of pages in the file, which was the size of a phone book. "Henry McCoy down in New York thought there was something weird with your test results, and I agree, but neither of us think PNES is the solution to the problem. Now, your EEGs don't show the transients that are usual in epilepsy, but if I went by EEGs alone I'd say you were constantly half-asleep. Your brainwaves are unusual, and some epileptic patients have normal EEGs, so that's not reliable on its own. Most likely your mutation interacts somehow with the area of your brain that's responsible for the seizures. We're not sure how, but there's probably a connection. That's why I'd like to know more about where the abnormal electrical activity begins, and hence why I'd like to find any lesions that the meningitis left."

Joel was trying to follow this, a little lost. "Like, what, are you worried you'd mess with my mutation if you did surgery there?"

"Well, I _want_ to say no, but that's what we're trying to figure out," said Dr. Gervais. "The surgery isn't so invasive that, like, the scalpel slips and you're a vegetable. I'm just saying I wish I knew the details. But some of your seizures are obviously temporal lobe, so we can place the electrodes there, which should stop the secondary generalised seizures. The ones with the bees. But I'll warn you now that the absences might not stop, because we're not sure where those are coming from. Is that okay?"

"I'd step over my own grandmother to stop having grand mals."

"This is what I usually hear from E patients, yup. But it means you won't qualify for a driver's license, even if the generalised seizures stop. There's also a chance you'll respond to the drugs and everything will clear up. It's...the brain is a many-splendoured thing, you know. Even with regular people, it's messy. The brain is a weird soup under the best of conditions, and with mutants all bets are off. Some days I think, this is barely even science. Like Wolfgang Pauli said, not even wrong."

That sounded honest, Joel thought, but not very encouraging. "Not even wrong?"

Dr. Gervais leaned back in his chair and spread his hands. "Not even wrong. I think that quote's apocryphal, but some scientist was asking Pauli his opinion about a paper, and Pauli's reply was, 'It is not only not right, it is not even wrong.' When your suppositions and assumptions fail before you can even properly address the problem. Not only does the idea not get off the ground, it blows up on the runway. And that _happens._ Happens to bad scientists, happens to good ones. Nature is big. It doesn't follow its own rules. You learn that in the university lab, when you find that your fruit flies aren't following the rules of your little first-year experiment. You mess with their genes, their simple little drosophila genes, and something completely unexpected happens, so you massage the facts a little to make your graph look smoother. Stuff a few more things into the full suitcase. You're looking really worried now, and I'm sorry, but that's science, that's the same science that gave us penicillin and organ transplants. Science is looking for something that explains the world, and by explaining it, gives us a clue about what else to expect. When it does that, it's helping. But the process is messy. You get me?"

Joel shrugged. "I'm in theology, so."

"So you understand. You study something and you try your best, but you can't control it. Just because it matters doesn't mean you can have a guarantee. You want elegance, try pure math. _Maybe._ " Gervais smiled, then glanced down at his file and tapped the paper with his pen. "Now, I saved the worst bit for last." 

"The lumbar puncture."

"You must have had one with the meningitis."

"Yeah. I don't remember it, though." Why did he say that? Joel had some vague idea that it would save the doctor's feelings. But of course he remembered it. 

The disease had swept in with all the speed and destructive force of a tornado. A fluish morning at home, his mother shooing him to the bus stop ( _you'll feel better once you get there_ ), and as the day wore on, the classic symptoms: pounding headache, fever, a curiously stiff neck that made him hold his head oddly. By afternoon, a teacher had noticed and was about to send him home early when she saw the rash developing. Victory for public health education; she recognised the pattern and called an ambulance. Another boy at the school was sick as well. Flu in the morning, hospital in the evening.

And at the hospital, the lumbar puncture. Joel remembered being propped up on a stool in a darkened room, his Aunt Grace holding onto him with her strong cool nurse's hands, supporting all his fever-hot weight -- and they told him not to tense up. They were honest. _This is going to hurt, Joel, are you ready?_ He didn't remember what he answered, but they put the needle in his back and God, yes, it did hurt. The world slid like an egg yolk in the pan, but Aunt Grace held his shoulders up, she whispered, _Very good, lad, you're doing very well._ But she was afraid, and Joel had known then that he was dying.

But he'd lived. The unlikely luck of that struck him now as the nurse led him into the smaller room and left him alone to undress.

There was a knock on the door. Joel took a deep breath. "Yeah."

But it wasn't the nurse, it was Paul, his fair skin flushed with a watery green that made him look ill. "They said you might want, uh, some moral support."

"Yeah. I kinda do," Joel said, looking down and fussing with a shirt button, but then he panicked and tried to walk it back: "No, I'm being a sook, you don't have to stay. I know you hate needles."

Paul half-turned towards the door, shifting his bundled coat from one arm to the other. "Well...do you want me to go?"

"If you want to go, you can go."

"But do you want me to? I mean...I know you're..."

Paul made a vague, mocking gesture that suggested a bit of farcical Jansenist modesty -- flipping open an imaginary cassock, a gasp of shock. But the streams under his skin were still nervous green and a softer blue of worry, and Joel smiled.

"It's not like that," he said. "I don't care. It's just not very pretty."

Paul put his coat down on the chair and sat down, started to say something, then stopped and began again. "Listen. I've seen you _tout nu dans ta serviette qui te servait de pagne_ ," he said, quoting the Jacques Brel song. _Naked in a towel, which served as a loincloth._ "I know what the scarring looks like. It doesn't scare or disgust me. Startling, maybe at first. I'm done being startled. So we'll move on from that topic, okay? Besides, it's not needles or blood that bug me so much as the smell of it, the atmosphere, when someone's hurt. It's like wasabi, you eat a bit and think 'this is fine' and then it rips the roof of your mouth off. You know what I mean?"

"Well, I'll try not to be in too much pain."

"Shut up."

"Okay. We're doing this." Joel folded his shirt on the table, psyching himself up. "You want to tell them they can come in and get this over with?"

Paul did, and Dr. Gervais came in with a nurse and moved the stool closer to the bed. "It's Paul, isn't it? You can sit there. We'll have Joel on the table, less risk of herniation."

As Joel assumed the foetal position on the table, back exposed, Dr. Gervais made a small sound in his throat, the sort of sound you might make upon discovering bad steering in an otherwise good used car. "I'm surprised you didn't get some work done on some of these scars. Here comes the pinch. Is that bioluminescence?" he said to Paul as he administered the first needle. Lidocaine, not too bad. "I don't mean to be weird, it's just cool. I just haven't seen that in a mutation before."

"Yeah, I have over a hundred thousand complex and simple subdermal photophore organs," Paul said in his favourite informative-but-bored tone, the one he used to passively suggest that he wasn't thrilled about satisfying scientific curiosity. "They're emotionally responsive but the muscles are involuntary, so I can't put on shows or match my sweater or anything."

Dr. Gervais just laughed, oblivious. "That's so neat. Like deep sea cephalopods, right? They have photophores that are just insanely complex, they're like tiny eyes everywhere -- lenses and reflectors and colour filters and...I'm doing the thing, aren't I? Sorry."

Paul shrugged, not quite an acceptance, but asked, "What do you need spinal fluid for, anyway? I thought you only did this for infections."

"Mostly, not only. And that's in ordinary medicine. For mutants who fit a particular profile, it's a useful procedure for predicting how the brain will respond to the drug therapy we administer after the surgery is completed and the implants are programmed. The result from this will be the final arbiter on whether this surgery is appropriate or not. I'm very confident, though."

"So this might all be a waste of money, is what you're saying."

"Paul..." Joel made a _tone it down_ gesture from the table. But he was thinking it too. Prawn had cashed the cheque, characteristically, and Joel had cashed a few Canada Savings Bonds to get them over the hump. His father used to give him one every year for Christmas. His mother had said she was willing to lend them some cash if they needed it for surgery. For the rest, she'd said she wasn't going to be responsible for Joel's poor judgement, and Joel was now resigned either to dealing with the family's obnoxious financial planner or getting an ordinary bank loan like a peasant.

Dr. Gervais was done with swabbing the cold antiseptic fluid over the skin and was prepping a needle. Yellow flashed along Paul's temples. "Oh, God."

"Don't look at it. And don't tell me how big it is, either."

"Guys, please don't freak each other out, okay? It's not big, it's a very fine needle. Joel, we want you to be way chilled out for this because if you're too tense, that changes the CSF pressure. Don't hold your breath, just breathe. We're gonna numb you into next week, I promise."

Even with the anaesthetic, he felt it, every millimetre, straight between his bones. Paul knew better than to make any attempt at distracting conversation, and instead just sat, breathing shallowly.

"And straighten out your legs..."

It was like the pangs of joint pain he got when he hadn't had enough sleep, but more intense and tighter, as if something might pop. He wasn't so sure something hadn't popped, down there in the numbed-out regions of his spine. He prayed, to keep his mind busy more than anything else. A simple scrap of Latin, mantra-like, nothing onerous. _Adoramus te Christe, benedicimus tibi..._

And then he felt it. Once in school someone had headbutted him -- not even on purpose, but Joel had been cutting through the lunch crowd and somehow wandered into a fight between two hulking grade elevens, one of whom reared and charged without looking. This was like that, not a touch or a probe but an onslaught on his mind. A telepath nearby, and obviously powerful. He thought that surely he must have jerked or thrashed, but Gervais was still murmuring calmly about spinal fluid and subarachnoid space. The great vastness of Nature.

_Leave me alone,_ someone said in his mind. _Shut the noise off or I'll crack your goddamn head open. I can do it._

He couldn't think, couldn't string two words together. The telepath prodded him, rummaged through a few recent memories ( _tea and buckwheat pancakes at breakfast, stretches of salt-parched highway, magazines in the waiting room_ ), then seemed apologetic. _New one. All right. Keep the creepy Latin chanting to yourself, though. Quiet. Everyone can hear._

Joel had always been sensitive to telepaths poking around in his head, and the Professor had thought he possessed some kind of weak, latent psionic power, but never enough to make it worth the trouble of learning exercises or techniques. _I don't know how to do what you're telling me, and my head fucking hurts._

_No kidding, eh,_ the telepath replied. _The cripples don't stay long, though. You'll be fixed in no time. We just wait and wait. Not easy being a mystery, is it? Just put your walls up and keep quiet._

_Wait--_ but the connection was closed. Joel opened his eyes. The needle was out, and Gervais was dressing the puncture site. It was useless to reach after the phantom voice, useless as trying to fly, but Joel tried anyway, until they left him and Paul alone in the dimly lit recovery room.

"You want to catch some zeds?" said Paul.

"There are telepaths here," Joel said. The headache was already beginning, whether from the spinal tap or the psychic concussion.

"So?"

So, indeed. Joel couldn't formulate a good reason for what he was thinking; he had some hazy image of mutants in cages like lab rats, but thought that was probably unlikely. Any telepath who could hit a person that hard would be difficult to hold. But something was out of joint here. Paul wrinkled his nose and nodded, a few bright darts of interest flashing under his skin and disappearing. "Maybe I'll go look for a bathroom, then."

* * *

He really did need a bathroom, in order to do any serious exploring. Paul locked himself in the men's room and got the Dermacolor out of his messenger bag. He kept a tube in there for emergencies where he had to badly fake normality, even though it didn't really pass at close quarters. The light in the washroom was bad, a harsh fluorescent that made everything too purple, but he managed to approximate an ordinary Caucasian winter skintone on his face and neck. Hands were tougher, and he didn't carry the more durable makeup around with him, so he found a pair of black acrylic gloves in his bag and hoped no one would mistake him for a jewel thief. Luckily he'd been in a mood for respectability that morning, and had dressed in a blue button-down shirt and dark trousers, which looked rather office-ish. Not bad. Better than jeans, at least. If he got caught, he could play dumb and talk his way out of trouble. Fake some neuro symptoms if necessary.

His bag also had a large interoffice envelope, full of pamphlets about digging wells in Haiti, and Paul used it as a prop, hefting it under his arm as if it were very important.

He left the bathroom and picked a direction at random, going right and following his nose. He kept his head up, walking briskly and occasionally checking his phone or fiddling with the closure on the envelope. Exploring buildings had been a hobby of his since high school, before the mutation manifested, messing around with his friends. They explored the old Eaton building and the ruins of the Redpath sugar refinery, like most kids who were into that sort of thing and not afraid of floors that were ready to collapse. Paul had found it more of an interesting challenge to wander through currently occupied buildings, seeing how far he could get before someone kicked him out. In retrospect, it all reeked of suburban white kid entitlement, especially in his serene belief that he'd never get arrested or fined. Having a physical mutation had knocked him down the ladder by a couple of rungs, and it was now only too easy to piss off the wrong cop and wind up in safety for a night.

So it was worth being careful.

Neurocherche was a big place, and Paul took advantage of his anonymity. He didn't know what he was looking for, but he knew he probably wasn't supposed to be able to find it, so at the first STAFF ONLY door he tried the knob. Locked. Paul smiled at a passing nurse and strode off down a different hall.

As he left the clinic area, the smells began to change from ordinary office emotions of boredom and concentration to something meatier, whiffs of fluoride and stomach acid. In one hallway, the lights were turned off like in a school in summertime, but when Paul glanced up he saw that there were in fact no lights. No electrical outlets, either.

He tried another NO ADMITTANCE door, and this time got through into another hallway, this one lit by lights in metal cages like emergency lamps. Closet. Bathroom. And, at the end of the hall, a door with a keypad beside it -- impasse.

Paul wished Niko were here: she was a technopath, and could bust through these computerised locks with ease. Even Prawn could have done that, albeit less elegantly. He was about to give up when something made him turn around. What? Nothing. A door on the other side of the hall, with a danger sign and an ordinary lock.

_A good lock. But not that good. You could get through. Remember how?_

A pressure behind his sinuses, like an ice cream headache. _Yes._ He could get through a lock like this. His father had taught him how to use a pick and a tension wrench, and it hadn't been completely successful. _("You're a clumsy one, aren't you? Use a bit of subtlety.")_ It had taken a long time to learn the sounds and feel of tumblers moving in a deadbolt, and even now the more difficult locks confounded him, but this -- yes, he could do it.

He used a paperclip scavenged from the brochures in the envelope. The door thrummed under his fingers -- it was a mechanical room. The pins inside began to give way, two at a time, and Paul listened carefully to the tiny clicks in the lock.

At last the lock felt right, and he turned the plug. The door opened, and he was in the hot and noisy mechanical room. Boiler room? He didn't know what it was called.

How had he got in here?

Paul rolled the paperclip between his fingers, which were red and sweaty. He'd taken his right glove off at some point, and his bioluminescence shed a faint blue glow in the dark room. The machines made loud churning noises, and it was uncomfortably hot. What was he doing in here? Better go before someone caught him.

But on one wall, a panel had been removed, exposing the aluminum ribs of a wall vent. It was clear within, about three feet by three feet, and the air was relatively cool. _That goes straight through. It's perfectly safe._ Paul found himself kneeling down beside the open vent when he felt a hand on his shoulder.

He looked up and saw a security guard in blue, a paunch hanging over his belt. The man wore a small device that hooked around one ear, like a telephone headset, but it had a scrappy, prototype look to it, a single red LED blinking in the darkness. He took Paul's arm firmly and led him out of the boiler room, slamming the door. He had a fetid, goatish odour that Paul had come to associate with mild habitual cruelty, the sort of people who never got very excited about the pleasure or pain of others.

The man's face, though, was impassive. "What were you doing in there?"

Paul held up the envelope. "Glad someone found me. I was supposed to bring this to Human Resources, but the guy at the main desk must have misunderstood me when I asked for directions."

It was spectacular lying, the best he'd ever done in his life. Full marks for committing to the bit, anyway, even though the lie itself was completely absurd. At that, the man still didn't believe him. "How'd you get in?"

"The main entrance off--"

"To the mechanical room. Who gave you a key?"

"It wasn't locked," Paul heard himself say, sounding not only innocent but _confident_ in his innocence. "I thought this must be the door, since it was open and the only other one here is the one with the keypad."

He was dimly aware that he wanted to say other things, but he couldn't think of the words.

The guard nodded, as if this was a familiar occurrence. "Come on."

Paul followed the guard back out to the darkened hallway, the one with no wiring in it. He felt a sudden pop between his ears, like suction breaking, and he realised with a heavy stomach that he was in a lot of trouble. Here the man faced him again and said, "Who gave you a key?"

Suddenly he could talk again. The truth fell out in a rush. "Nobody did. Nobody. I don't know what happened."

"You don't have a key?"

"I picked the lock," Paul said, because he knew it was true, but he couldn't understand how something like that had happened. One of the Oblates at St. Rita's had taught him how to jimmy a cheap door with a credit card, because priests were always getting stuck in institutions with lousy locks; they knew things like that. But that was the extent of his abilities in the field of burglary. The last ten minutes were dreamlike, nonsensical. "That's -- look, I know I shouldn't have been back there, sir, but I never intended--"

"Relax, relax." The man adjusted his belt, and took out his walkie-talkie. "Someone arrange a sed for 129, thanks, over."

"What happened?"

"Not your fault. Just go deliver the package. And stay out of the Staff Only areas. Second thought, give the envelope to me and I'll bring it to HR."

Paul handed over the envelope to the guard, feeling dazed. He made a swift retreat back through the corridors to Joel's recovery room. _Do not under any circumstances let them open that envelope until we get out of here, God, I mean it. Haven't I done enough for you?_ Someone had closed the blind in the little room, and it smelled, Christ, it was wasabi in here everywhere.

"What's wrong?" Joel said stiffly, when he heard Paul's breathing.

"Something weird happened. And I lost all those pamphlets about Haiti."

"What?"

Paul groped for a chair in the dimness, stripping off his other glove and reaching for the box of tissues on the table to wipe the gunk off his face. "I was in this hallway, dead end, about to turn back. But I didn't do it. I started -- I started trying to get into this boiler room. By picking the lock. And it made perfect sense to me at the time, like I was thinking about my dad teaching me to break into places. I wasn't scared of getting caught, nothing."

"Your dad knows how to break into places? I thought he sold Subarus."

"My stepdad," said Paul, annoyed in spite of himself that Joel would make that mistake. "My real dad was a pharmacist."

"Known for their cat burglary skills, of course."

"That's my point, douche. This was..."

"They weren't your thoughts," Joel said slowly. "Not your memories."

"No. They weren't. That's not what happened to you, is it?"

Joel started to shake his head, then winced and kept it still. "Ow. No."

"So what's going on?"

Joel lay still for a long time, and Paul wondered if he'd gone to sleep or fallen into an absence seizure.

The door opened, and a nurse bobbed her head in. "Checks."

"They do that every five or ten minutes," said Joel. "So I can't go over there and see for myself. Not today, anyway. I'll email the Professor, I guess. A lab full of telepaths is his department, if it's anyone's. Or maybe Dr. McCoy, I guess, since apparently he's heard of Neurocherche. Fuck, I don't know. I can't even think today. But you know -- we're dealing with a procedure done on mutants with mental and neurological problems. There are bound to be some unhinged telepaths in the building. It might not be a big deal. You smelled Gervais, right? He's for real?"

"I thought he was okay," Paul admitted. "But not the hallway, or the security guard. They smelled...you can't trust them. Maybe Gervais doesn't know the whole story. Or maybe he just doesn't feel guilty. But this place has all the wrong smells. You can't let these people cut you open. You can't."

Joel sighed. "All right. All right. God, I really thought this was going to work."

* * *

**From:** jkmccree@gmail.com  
 **To:** henry.mccoy@xavierinstitute.edu  
 **Subject:** questions, if you have time, re Neurocherche

Filling in the header was as far as he'd got. No one would bother to read his email (possibly including Dr. McCoy), so it had to be safe to talk about it, right? He couldn't find a way to phrase his doubts about Neurocherche without sounding ridiculous, didn't know what questions to ask, didn't know what evidence was significant. Telepaths in a laboratory, who wanted to get out. Fine. Joel had been in psych wards and mental hospitals long enough to know that wanting to escape didn't mean you were being mistreated. When you were locked up you just wanted out.

The dangerous thing was that the Gatineau Accords meant there were very few restrictions on how health care providers had to treat mutants. Joel had watched the first few Supreme Court challenges carefully, wishing his father was still alive, but the decisions had all been discouraging. Public safety came first, and it wasn't hard to get labelled as dangerous.

The date on the computer read December 29, and Joel realised that Hodya hadn't called him yet for the holidays. Or his birthday, which had been even crappier than usual because he'd had a lumbar puncture to suffer through. Hodya was probably waiting for him. She worried about bugging him when he was busy, and he worried about the same thing. _So functional._ He wondered what time it was in Jerusalem, tried to do the math, failed, and finally had to Google for a time zone converter.

He thought it was doable, since she liked late nights while she was on holiday, and indeed she answered in Hebrew on the second ring.

"Is it ' _boker tov_ ' over there?" he said. 

_"Yoel! Ma nishma?_ Yeah, I was just about to go to bed. How was birthday-Christmas?"

"Hectic, I guess." He decided not to open the discussion of his health, because she would have a lot of questions about the doctor and he just wasn't up to talking about it. "How was Hanukkah?"

"What, two weeks ago? We had these cheese bimuelos and keftes de prasas and fried eggplant and fried artichokes, oh my God, these artichokes. You could eat the leaves whole without doing the tooth-scrapey thing, they just crunch and go right down. I got a nice Hanukkah belly going on. If you ever come here I need to get you to my savta's house so she can kill you with food."

"Paul would kill _me_ if I went to the Holy Land and ate like a king while he sits here with his cans of silkworms," Joel said. "But that sounds good. I don't know what some of those words mean but I like the idea of a frying holiday."

"Isn't that what Mardi Gras is? Fat Tuesday?"

"Irish people don't get to have any fun on Fat Tuesday. We just eat pancakes. How are you, other than well-fed?"

"Mmm." He heard her settling back against something that creaked, perhaps wicker or a couch with old springs. "Well, it's about two in the morning. I was watching the BBC news, and eating a sandwich, roast beef with lettuce and tomato and mustard and swiss cheese. And now the sandwich is gone, and there's a pear sitting on the end table here, but I won't eat it over the phone. Crunching sounds gross. Abba's gone to bed. Everything is -- let me turn the TV off -- everything is very quiet. I can just hear the traffic from around the corner. And a dripping faucet in the kitchen. Now you go."

Joel smiled. It was something she'd done with him over the phone for years, making him a picture of her surroundings with as much mundane detail as she could. It was calming for both of them -- Hodya wasn't neurotic on a level with Joel or Paul, but she had panic attacks sometimes when she was overstressed, and she said talking to him helped. Which seemed like a bizarre reversal of the natural order of things, but it felt good. "I'm in the office at the house. I was...I was going to write to Dr. McCoy, back in Westchester. I don't know if you remember me talking about him. I had some questions about my new doctor, but I couldn't think of how to write them. And I remembered that I miss you, so I called. And it's only seven o'clock here. It was -- it's not snowing anymore, but there's snow on the ground, fresh snow on the windowsill. There's a bird's tracks there on the sill, two footprints and a swoosh from the wings. All I can hear is the furnace and the dishwasher."

"You're improving. What are you wearing?"

"Is this going to get dirty?"

"No, it's the picture game, play along," she said stubbornly. "We don't do Skype, so you have to picture-game me and say what you look like today."

"I'm wearing the usual. Jeans, blue sweater. I bought it at Loblaws, you know that clothing section they have in the really giant stores? That's how lazy my fashion sense is, I buy clothes at the grocery store."

"Yeah, well, guys can get away with that," said Hodya. "I like the Loblaws clothes, actually. If I'm visiting somewhere and all of a sudden I need a really boring _tzanua_ outfit, Loblaws is where I go for those long stretchy pencil skirts and button-downs. I'm wearing pajama bottoms that have apricots printed on them, yellow tank-top, purple underwear, no socks. Socks are for losers. Now you, keep going."

He rolled his eyes. "White socks, no shoes, black underwear, watch, scapular, MedicAlert bracelet. Two dollars and change in my pockets. Bit of dirt under the left thumbnail."

"Thank you. What's a scapular?"

"That weird wooly thing on the string, you've asked about it before."

"Oh, your weird wooly thing. Yeah, I remember now, I just forgot its fancy name. You sound tired, _motek._ "

"Don't I always?"

"A lot of the time," she admitted, not taking his tone as a hint to gloss over the topic. "It's better than when I first met you. Then you just sounded dead. That was...oh God, we were sixteen, and you were home on a weekend pass from St. Rita's. I think I only saw you for half an hour or so during dinner, while our dads were comparing golf courses."

"That was a long time ago."

"I was scared of you, in a way. Not that I thought you'd hurt anyone -- I knew you weren't that sort of sick, or that sort of mutant. But I was afraid you'd break right in front of everyone, cause a big scene. Or worse, that it _wouldn't_ cause a scene, that everyone would try to pretend nothing was wrong. That's Ottawa's official hobby, pretending nothing's wrong. Instead you just disappeared, wouldn't even talk to me."

"A long time ago," he said again. "I've changed."

"You have. But you still won't talk to me. Not as much as I'd like."

This was about not calling. "I'm sorry. I don't...I've been neglecting you."

"That's not it, Joel. I don't need constant attention from you. I have other friends. Other guys take me out in Toronto, you knew that. You and me, what we have is nice. If it goes further that would probably be extra super nice, but if it doesn't I think we'll both live. To be honest. But when I do hear from you it would be nice to actually hear something. Do you know?"

Joel had not, in fact, known for sure that Hodya was dating other people. She had talked about it, and he had agreed in principle that it was totally fine. Justifiable, considering the situation. He hadn't really thought that she would take that as permission. No, not permission -- waiving his right to get upset, maybe. At that, he wasn't sure if it bothered him or not, that she saw other guys. 

No, it kind of did.

Even though they saw each other less, and even though he'd been keeping things from her, he still liked to think of her as his beautiful secret. _You'd never know it to look at me, but this amazing girl actually talks to me. What a fucking surprise, huh?_ But now other people were going around, also feeling good about having Hodya around. And childishly enough, Joel felt diminished by that, as if he'd run out of time to win her over, like the candles in the red glasses before the Blessed Sacrament that burned down and dimmed. Going out slowly like stars.

"It takes a long time," he said. "I'm sorry it takes me so long. I'm sorry. You know I'd give you more if I had it. More energy, more time, more everything, more..."

He trailed off, as if "everything" were not everything, as if he could offer her still something else. St. Clare looked down at him from the far wall, bare feet under her robe, her hand raised to her heart as if she would give that away too. The one thing saints never gave away. Never really. "I wanted to talk to you that first night when we were kids," he said into the phone, voice falling to a whisper. "I don't know what I would have said. Just that I thought you were beautiful, maybe, but that's such a scary thing to say. And if you were here now I'd try harder, I'd give you everything I have. I would."

"What would you give me?" she asked, a smile coming into her voice. Either she wasn't taking him seriously, or he'd made an idiot of himself and she was throwing him a lifeline. He found it hard to tell with her. Their moods never matched. "I want tangibles, give me results. Would you give me your pots and pans? Good pots and pans are hard to come by."

"Of course, the whole set. And, what else, I'd give you my stapler, the big black one, and the three-hole punch that my mum stole from school. They're yours."

"Office supplies, not too bad. For a dowry like that I suppose I'd let you kiss me."

"This _is_ getting dirty."

"Don't call it dirty. I don't like that. When was the last time I was down to Montreal? August or September? And we had to make out in the Beaux-Arts because you didn't want to warp the fragile mutant minds of your house kids?"

"Not wanting to get physical in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds isn't weird," he said, defensive. "Ask some of your other boyfriends."

"Whoa." A small silence at the other end of the line. "Are you jealous?"

He had the feeling that he ought to be more worked up than he was. "No. Sorry, that came off really douchey. I'm not jealous, I'm just--"

"You're hurt."

"I guess. No. We're not as close as we were last year, that's fine. I'm happy for you."

"Ha," she said softly. "I always thought that was sweet about you, that you only tell the nice lies. I'm not so sure anymore."

"Sorry."

"No, I'm sorry, that was me being passive-aggressive this time. I was going for facetious. What I mean is, you don't have to lie to me. If you're hurt, you can say so. I'm not necessarily going to drop everything else and get exclusive again, because that needs a bigger conversation. But saying it bugs you, that's allowed."

"A little bit hurt." 

"And you know that you can tell me too, if you want to see other people," she said. "I don't want you to feel like you're bound by some kind of solemn vow to never be attracted to anyone else. I don't want to be your obligation. Or you for me, either. Just... _people_ who like each other. Can we do that?"

"Yeah." He did like her. "I do wish you were here. Really."

She was eating the pear, despite her promise not to. He heard the first crunch. Her voice, when she swallowed, was lower. "Do you want me to come down there for New Year's? I could."

"Really?"

"If you want, just for a day or two. See you, get some good bagels. Make out in the Beaux-Arts or whatever it is we do. Get back to Toronto in time to get my books for winter term."

"I'd like that." He was nervous suddenly, wanted to back out, even though he wanted to see her again, the snow in her hair, her luggage laid out on his bed. The way she draped her sweater on the chair. "I don't -- um, we're having cash flow problems right now. It can't be a lavish weekend."

"When are we ever lavish? And how are you having cash flow problems?" she said, curious rather than disappointed.

"Just me being stupid with money. And we lost a big chunk paying bails too." He debated also telling her that it might not be safe, then decided that Department H probably wouldn't touch a diplomat's daughter. 

She let it go. "I'll email when I know what flight I'm taking. But I'll see you New Year's Eve. Exciting, I get to kiss someone for once. That's never happened, I'm always single at the wrong time. Anyway. Love you."

"Love you too. _Lailah tov._ "

"That's terrible, keep practicing. Yalla, bye."

* * *

Prawn had spent a few days at a shitty motel in Pointe St-Charles, a place with stains on the ceiling and a snowy TV at the end of the bed. He couldn't give enough of a fuck to clean up the antenna's signal just to watch some French talk show. He hadn't been able to face anyone at St. John of God House, particularly Mars and Zizi, who were acting as if he'd robbed them. But as he was putting down his third eighty dollars for the room, he decided that he could put up with dirty looks if it meant free bed and board. Wasting this money felt sacrilegious, perhaps because it had fallen on him so miraculously. Maybe because it had fallen on him like a baseball bat, and he felt like he had to behave.

So that night, after a day wandering downtown, he went back up Rue Sainte Famille and climbed over the house's back fence, wading through the deep snow in the back garden and letting himself in through the heavy oaken door that was always unlocked.

It was late, around eleven, but the door to the office was standing open and McCree was still up, slumped at the desk as he read something online, squinting in the pale, lunar light cast in the dark room by the monitor. He looked up when he saw Prawn, but only raised his eyebrows in greeting.

"Eh up," said Prawn. "All right if I stay here a night or two?"

"'Course. Top bedroom on this side's free."

"Good."

"Tough finding apartments this time of year, I know." Joel turned his eyes back to the screen, hitting the back button on the keyboard a couple of times. "Assuming that's what you intend to be doing."

It was, eventually. Prawn had gone through the classifieds, and even called a landlord, muddling through a brief conversation in French enough to agree on an appointment date. He had then flopped down on the motel bed, wondering if he ought to take off for Toronto or New York instead, or maybe even go back home to Leeds. No, not to Leeds. London. No, Notts -- he could live with his old mate from school, maybe. And the cities all collapsed together, and he couldn't imagine himself living anywhere, doing anything. He was trapped in a bubble, here in Montreal, and he couldn't see outside it. Being a half-mad homeless mutant in French Canada was such an unlikely turn of events that nothing else on earth could be impossible: everything was equally probable from this vantage point. No one could make a decision in a bubble like that.

"Do you want it back?" he asked abruptly. He hadn't known he'd say it until that moment, but might as well address the elephant in the room.

Joel knew exactly what he meant, not looking up. "Nope."

"Seriously."

"Seriously nope."

"You must be skint. How fucking rich are you that you can shrug off fourteen thousand dollars?"

Joel rolled his chair back over the floorboards and said, "Prawn, I own an island."

"Oh." Not much to say to that, really.

"No, I'm messing with you. Sort of. It's a shitty island, just a lump of trees and granite off Rockport with a cottage and a boathouse on it. And I don't want to sell it, either, so it may as well be a bill for property taxes. But I _could_ sell it, and yeah, it's one more island than most people own. I'm very far from poor. Just temporarily inconvenienced."

It was a bit like finding out that your kindergarten teacher went into the job for the benefits -- not exactly shocking, but still somehow a bummer. "So that whole performance on Christmas was just to psych me out?"

"Uh, _no._ " Joel leaned over to turn the lamp on and got to his feet. "Absolutely not. Why the hell would I do that? I meant every word I said to you that night, and I'll say it again. Please, please, please stay away from Department H."

"Why? What do you know about them that makes you so sure?" Prawn hadn't been able to come up with a satisfactory answer to this question on his own, no matter how much he'd wrestled with it at night on his lumpy motel bed.

"I already told you," said Joel slowly. He sounded so worn out that the prospect of having to argue over this again almost made him scared. "I talked and I talked. Didn't you understand me?"

"No. I didn't. Tell me again. There's a reason you don't trust these people."

"Jesus Christ. I don't trust them because they've been _watching the house_ , because they _followed you_ , because they hassled me in the goddamn hospital and because they're manipulating people. Including you. This is the way they behave when they're trying to get on your good side, so how are they going to act once you've signed things and they own you? And I can't believe I still have to say this when you've been living at the house this long, but even if they were completely honest and aboveboard, I would have written that cheque."

"Right, but that's exactly the part I'm not clear on," he snapped, exasperated by this conversation. "Why? What do you care?"

"Prawn." Ridiculous that a schoolboy nickname had gone this far, overgrown his real name, crossing the Atlantic with him and bobbing up like a silly little cork in this conversation which should have been serious. "Be real with me here. You're a powerful mutant. More than me, more than anyone else in this house, and you might be in the running for scariest mutant in the province. You could be a walking neutron bomb, and while ninety-six thou a year is a lot of money to you, to the government that's incredibly cheap. That's what Department H wants you for. They want a weapon. I don't want to see them use you as one. Okay? Clear yet?"

_They want a weapon_ hit him like a blow to the windpipe. "What, that's the only thing you think I'd be useful for?"

"To them? Yeah, honestly. To me, to us, to normal people? Of course not. But you've had accidents before, and you hurt people. You didn't mean to, but you did, and that was why you came here. You said then that you didn't want to live like that."

"I had _one_ accident. The second time was self-defence."

"Okay, self-defence. But they both happened in a context of garden-variety violence. You didn't have to get into that fight in Leeds, anyway -- I'll admit the second incident's more of a grey area. I wrote the cheque because I was bribing you to keep doing what you know is right. You know where violence leads, in the end. It leads to that guy in the alley with his brain cooked in his skull. Many times over. You're kidding yourself if you think that isn't what the government wants with you."

It hurt to hear, but Prawn wasn't that naïve; he knew that the only thing he possessed worth ninety-six thou a year was his mutation. He could learn other skills, but nothing he could learn was ever going to be as important as the DNA he'd been born with. "Oh, fuck, man. I'm not -- I'm not going to kill anyone. I only meant to go along with the thing until something more fun came along, you know? Take their money, leave when I felt like it. When they wanted someone dead, I'd leg it. But then I thought you must know something I don't, that they wouldn't let me go. That's not how it is?"

Joel sat down on the edge of the desk. "They said it was a combat position. Combat means hurting people. Even if they don't ask you to do it, they'd be asking you to help. What I'm trying to say here is that there is nothing morally good that you can do with an organisation like that, not even answering phones or opening mail. That's my position. You can disagree if you want, and God knows plenty of people do, but don't misunderstand me. I think Department H is sketchy as hell, and I have no idea what they'd do if you tried to leave in breach of contract. Probably they'd do more than sue. But I'd pay you just as much not to join the army."

"Then you're crazy," said Prawn. He was in a small room with a bona fide certifiable lunatic. And the lunatic was his best option, compared with the government. That was fucking sad. "Christ, McCree, that's not a normal opinion to have. What about Aurora, anyway? You weren't breaking your neck to keep her out of Department H, were you?"

Joel sat heavily back in his chair. "I thought there wasn't any point in writing that cheque unless I went balls to the wall with it. And Aurora heard the same arguments you did. If you have any better ideas, let me hear 'em."

"Oh aye, am I allowed to have ideas now? Fuck ideas, how about this one -- what would you have done if you'd been where I was, in that alley in Pointe St-Charles? Get stabbed?"

"I wasn't there. If you want my opinion, sure, you had a right to defend yourself." 

He let the rest hang there, and Prawn got the message. There was a difference between fending off an attack and microwaving a guy's brain. "Look, mate, I'm not here to argue over shit I did years ago. But you want to talk about power and doing stuff that's way over the top? You had something over my head and you fucking used it. You didn't give me the chance to decide that I _want_ to be a weirdo hippie pacifist. Even if I do decide that's how I want to play it, now it's never gonna feel like it was really my choice to make. It'll always be in the back of my mind that there was this money and we had this fight."

Joel got up again, but he didn't leave the room, just paced back around to the desk chair. After one of his lengthy pauses ( _we still on the air, Bob?_ ), he said, "That's...okay, yeah. You make a good case."

"Christ, mate, I wanted you to have a better answer for me than that," Prawn said wearily. 

"I didn't see it that way when I was doing it. But _you_ see it that way, and now that you point it out -- it makes sense." Joel reached out and absently clicked off the lamp and the sleeping monitor, making the room darker again. "You know the story of Francis of Assisi?"

Prawn rolled his eyes. "Fuck's sake, here we go."

"Will you just indulge me for a second? The backstory, the origin story. His dad was a rich merchant. Cloth, I think. Big business in those days, medieval Italy. Francis was working the family business in the marketplace when a homeless guy asked him for spare change. Francis had to wait until his shift was done, but then he abandoned the shop, ran after the homeless guy and gave him everything he had in his pockets. Francis' dad wasn't happy. Years later, Francis is still pulling the same shit, and his dad is just done. He starts legal proceedings against his own kid in front of the bishop, you know, just trying to keep this crazy kid from hemorrhaging money from the family. So Francis formally says, 'Okay, dad, you don't owe me anything. Legally I am not your son, legally I won't inherit a dime, legally I don't even own the clothes on my back.' He strips down naked and walks the fuck out." Joel mimed a mic drop, making a _pwoof_ sound to accompany it.

"What about his dad?"

"Well, exactly. Dad's not important to the story anymore. One of Francis' first followers was St. Clare -- that's her in the poster on that wall. She was the same way, rich dad. She was supposed to get married to some other rich guy, but she sneaks out of her palace at night and runs away to join Francis' crowd of weirdos. Cuts off her hair and gives away her fancy clothes. You see the pattern? This is one of the most common ways for a saint's story to start out," Joel said. "Step one, give away everything you have. Doesn't matter how, just get rid of it. I grew up on these stories. Had a picture book about St. Francis when I was little."

"You had a really weird childhood."

"Kinda, yeah. But the thing is, it _does_ matter where the money goes. It matters how you give and who you give it to and why. It matters who you leave behind. And you're right. I was thinking of you the way Francis thought of that homeless guy. I thought, it's wrong that I have the luxury of just saying no to Department H without having to worry about jobs and dentistry. It's wrong that you have to make that decision based on cash, when it's your life. And I thought, well, the Assisi technique is you just get rid of the money, and holiness follows. So that's what I did. And I'm sorry, because I wasn't thinking about the blowback from that choice."

Once again, Prawn had run out of fucks to give for the night. It was hard to listen to that and still be upset at Joel; the guy was a religious nutcase but he had meant well, and was at least admitting that he'd been wrong. That meant Prawn didn't have anyone else he could easily be mad at. Department H was a nebulous body of government twats, easy to hate but hard to focus on. "Well, brilliant, but now what?" Prawn said, a tacit acceptance of the apology. "Now how do I do fucking anything?"

"Honest to God, I don't know. I guess we'll have a house meeting in the morning and find consensus--yeah, I know, I hate it too," Joel said when Prawn groaned. "Everyone hates consensus, but it beats the alternative. Until then, you've got the bedroom on the third floor."

That was an invitation to leave, and not a moment too soon, because the both of them were knackered. Prawn went upstairs to the third floor, which smelled like old wool blankets, and he watching the shadows of the bare branches outside sway across the walls. He lay awake and wondered why people decided to do anything at all. All the most irrevocable choices he'd ever made had been impulses at best. If he had any beliefs that were as strong as McCree's deluded pacifism, if he had any stakes and string that measured out his plot of the world and circumscribed his movements...then he didn't even know what they were. He wouldn't know where those lines were until he tripped over them. Until someone told him to cross them.

_Fuck if I'm going to let them tell me that._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explaining some references here... 
> 
> Paul quotes Jacques Brel's "[ _Au Suivant_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3zlM7d69rA)", which kind of has to be seen to be believed.
> 
> Loblaws is a large chain of grocery stores in Canada, which also sells housewares and yes, really boring but practical clothes from the Joe Fresh line. 
> 
> _Tzanua_ is the adjectival form of _tzniut_ , a modesty standard in Judaism. Basically Hodya's talking about visiting with more Orthodox friends or relatives (which might include going to synagogue more than she's used to) and needing clothes that cover the right amount of skin.
> 
> Details of Catholic life: [weird wooly thing on the string](http://www.discountcatholicstore.com/cloth_scapular.htm), and yes, [St. Francis picture book](http://www.amazon.ca/gift-Saint-Francis-first-cr%C3%A8che/dp/0688065023), things from my childhood that are less well-known outside the bubble.
> 
> "An island off Rockport" means a cottage in the Thousand Islands, [pretty much like this one.](http://honeybeeisland.com/images/large/1000-islands-vacation.jpg)


	7. Undoer of Knots

_Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever._  
_It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken_  
_bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of_  
_thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future._  
—Margaret Atwood, _Cat's Eye_

Hodya had been in transit since five a.m. her time: first dozing in the passenger seat while her father drove her from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, then a flight to Istanbul where she had a pointless four-hour layover. Four hours wasn't enough to really do anything, but it was long enough to wish you had somebody's couch to curl up on. No free WiFi in the Ataturk airport, good times. She window-shopped her way through the duty-free shops, pretending that she was a likely customer for perfumes with prices in the triple digits. Finally she got to board the next plane to Heathrow, where the connection time was so short that she had to sprint to Delta, no time for buying herself something that would pass for a lunch. From London, over the wrinkled ocean for hours, to JFK, which was a zoo. She elbowed her way through the crowds and bought three plastic trays of vegetable sushi rolls. Not very classy, but cheap sushi was always what she craved in airports: cool, soft, no grease, no heat lamps, no waiting. It settled her stomach, which might have been due to the curls of pink pickled ginger.

Another run to Air Canada, and finally she was in the air headed for Montreal. By this time she was frayed at the edges, exhausted and overcaffeinated, unable to concentrate on her book. Instead she just stared out the window at the featureless winter landscape, the low mountains and the highways breaking up the fields of snow. 

When she landed at Trudeau International, she was trying to come up with some conversational topics she could use with Paul, who was the one who always picked her up. Hodya liked Paul, but he was awkward around her. The nice interpretation was that he was just uneasy with baseline humans who didn't know him well, but she didn't quite buy that. 

It turned out to be moot; Paul wasn't there. Hodya waited for her luggage and then trundled her bag around Arrivals for awhile, checking her phone and hoping to see anybody from the house show up. _Don't get mad yet. Don't get mad. It's still the holidays. Things happen._

Finally she saw Joel's figure appear outside the doors, like a brushstroke of water dragged across blank paper, and he ghosted through the revolving doors without moving the panels, a faint _thup_ sound when he materialised fully in the corridor and the soles of his shoes hit the floor.

He'd lost weight since she'd last seen him in August, and Hodya had no idea where he'd even found that extra weight to lose -- he'd been skinny before, but now it was showing in his face, the hollows at his temples. But he gave her a smile, which she always liked seeing. _"What'd your parents pay for that smile?"_ she'd teased him once. "Hi, hey, I'm so sorry," he said as he came to her. "Have you been waiting long?"

"A few minutes," she said, and put her bags down to put her arms around his waist, resting her cheek against the lapel of his coat before she stretched up to kiss him. Sometimes when he'd just appeared, she thought she could smell it, something newly minted, particles summoned together from nothingness. An empty, clear smell, like the ozone of thunderstorms in the desert. _Yeah, horseshit, you're just smelling his soap._ "I wasn't expecting to see you here at all. I was looking for Paul and then he wasn't here..."

"Yeah, he was having a bad morning and wasn't really up to going out," Joel said diffidently. "I should've texted you on my way, sorry."

Hodya bent to pick up her bags again. "Well, is he okay? Are _you_ okay? You look thin, babe, I didn't realise you were actually getting that sick."

"Um, it snuck up on me, yeah. Paul's fine, he's just having a nervous day. And I'm having a lot of seizures lately, what else is new? I went into status epilepticus earlier in the month so the neurologist -- Christ, I'm sorry to be dumping this on you right away," Joel interrupted himself. "You must be sick of this--"

 _"Stooooop."_ Hodya drew it out, rolling her eyes back. " _No_ , I am not sick of you having the same condition you've had since I met you, okay? Chill out and let me give a shit about you." She took his arm, a gesture that made her think of elderly couples, in a nice way. People that went the distance. "The neurologist what?"

"The neurologist referred me to some clinic doing trials on mutants, and I had to go all the way out to Repentigny and get a lumbar puncture. The doctor seemed okay but..." He trailed off for awhile, taking her outside to the stop for the shuttle bus. "Their specialty is treating psionic mutants, so there were some disgruntled telepaths in the building. Which I might just chalk up to the usual, right? Hospitals and clinics have bad vibes. People aren't happy about being there. But Paul tried to do some snooping and he thought the staff didn't smell right."

"Okay, but sometimes he makes snap judgements that aren't completely fair," Hodya said. "Right? That's been known to happen."

"Are you guys mad at each other?"

"I'm not mad at him, it's a mild criticism. Honestly, we're friends on Facebook and everything but I don't have any contact with him unless it's through you." The shuttle bus pulled to a stop at the sign and Hodya picked up her bags and got on, with Joel following. "Today has me wondering if he's mad at _me_ , but I don't have any kind of problem with him. Probably if we were around each other more he'd loosen up, but...does he think I'm weird about physical mutants or something? Have I said anything gross and I didn't know it?"

"No, no." Joel sat down with her at the back of the little shuttle, a tiny but empty bus with a mysterious tip jar at the front. The shuttle was paid by the STM, and Joel wasn't familiar with tipping bus drivers in any other context, but he felt guilty ignoring the jar and always paid. "I think you're right, he's kinda stiff with you because you're not a mutant, but that's just him being insecure. It hits him sometimes."

"So...you're saying sometimes he distrusts people and it's not justified," said Hodya significantly, unbuttoning her coat. "Hm. Perhaps that has some application to what you were saying before. Okay, no, I'm just being obnoxious. But you're bugging your scientist girlfriend, Yoel. Don't go by spooky feelings when you're choosing a doctor, at least not to the exclusion of everything else. Your neurologist likes the new doctor, right? Did they answer your questions, were they well-informed about your condition, did they show concern for your comfort, et cetera?"

"They seemed good that way," Joel admitted. 

"Well, good. But if you really insist on being suspicious, I mean, there are always options. I had a long trip and I'm going to put my head right here while I theorise," Hodya said, leaning her head on his shoulder as she burrowed down in the corner between the seat and the window. She was tired but her mind was still racing from the caffeine. "They specialise in mutants, you were saying? Where's the money coming from for that?"

"The money?"

"Mutants are a pretty tiny minority. Mutants with mood disorders, even smaller. Mutants with neurological problems, smaller still. And in the U.S., mutants are very unlikely to have health coverage. It's a small market, so who's investing in these treatments? Who's paying for the research?"

Joel had been living among other mutants for so long that he sometimes forgot how few of them there actually were. "I don't know. I thought the province..."

"The province isn't going to put that much into a private health care company. No, your clinic probably has investors who think that the company will get something valuable out of this trial. It won't be a product that will fly off the shelves, obviously, because its customer base is going to be very small. Information is valuable, maybe, but I don't know what use anyone would have for results on epileptic mutants. Rich ones."

"It's not all epilepsy. They have a lot of telepathic patients," Joel said. "I don't know how rich they all are. It wouldn't surprise me if some of them got an all-expenses-paid trip."

"Right, the telepaths, okay. Research on telepathy is huge now, so that's a decent point. Military, AI guys, government, they all have boners for psionics. So Dr. Frankenstein's clinic convinces some corporate suits that their surgery will somehow lead to a better understanding of telepathy, and that explains a lot of their funding. But they could be public about that. Lots of people are doing it, and it must be hard to find subjects when you have to cast your net for a broad range of neurological problems and sift for psi-powers."

"I'm not good at thinking about this stuff."

Hodya closed her eyes, which felt gritty, her head still on his shoulder. "The Catholic theologian is complaining about convoluted ideas."

"Theologians aren't known for being too savvy about business, and I'm just a student. How bad was your flight, anyway?"

"Mm. I was four hours in Istanbul, not Constantinople. My grandmother told me to be careful around you, you know. Not my savta, she thinks we're romantic, but my mother's mother. She's Polish, so she doesn't have the best associations with Catholic boys. I told her you were studying theology and she said, 'You watch out, he might throw you away any time.'"

"Ouch."

"When in fact you're very suspiciously silent on that topic."

"Hodya..." Joel didn't like to talk about things like this, not in any specific way. But if she didn't make things explicit then she'd never hear an answer.

"Most Catholic guys I know -- the religious ones, I mean -- it seems like they think about the priesthood sometime."

"Well, yeah, because there's a shortage and our parish priests hassle every guy who goes to Mass and isn't married yet," Joel said, but he slid down in the bus seat too, nestling a little closer to Hodya. He wasn't always comfortable with touching, but sometimes they found the right way to be close and it felt good. "And...I didn't want you to worry like that, so I didn't...talk about it. It made sense in my head."

She sighed. She hadn't come here expecting good things, really, but she'd hoped for some closure. "That's not how you keep people from worrying, _motek._ Are you saying that's a yes on vows of celibacy?"

"No. I didn't want to bring it up until I was sure, one way or the other. And now my advisor says he doesn't think I'm right for it. He's right, of course he's right." Joel was looking down at the folds of her coat across his lap, the scuffed floor between their feet, the back of the seat in front of them. Anywhere but at her. "I'm not making vows of anything."

She moved to put her arm around his shoulders. No kind of victory for her, but at least it was an answer. She couldn't really imagine what it felt like; this project of his had always been alien to her. She wasn't religious and she wasn't Christian, and sometimes it seemed like he didn't want to explain _because_ she didn't already understand. Typical of him. But when he said _I'm not making vows of anything_ a piece of the puzzle clicked into place: it must feel a bit like a broken engagement, she thought. An imagined future that wasn't going to happen, a rejection, a relationship fallen apart. "They left you at the altar, huh?" she said with a sad smile.

"Man, don't put it like that."

"Just let me give a shit about you," she said again, watching the streets flicker past the windows. "And you'll have my back later. We'll figure this out, babe, whatever we're gonna be. It's okay."

* * *

When they got off the metro and walked home to Rue Sainte Famille, Joel took Hodya's bags up the steps for her. She usually gave him some pushback about that, _I can do more push-ups than you anyway_ , but right now she was too wiped out by the long flight.

In the front hall, Hodya paused at the bottom of the stairs and asked, "Where am I sleeping?"

She was willing to admit it to herself: she was testing him. If he couldn't commit to a shared bedroom for a weekend then there was nothing left to save here. Joel seemed to pick up on the fact that it was an important question, but didn't take a stand right away: "Uh, well, anywhere's fine..."

"Are you and Paul still sharing?" She wheeled her suitcase along with her to the stairs, and looked over her shoulder at him as he hesitated. "Yes? No?"

"Yeah."

"And he's here, so we can't stay upstairs in your room, okay. Got it. Where else is free?"

"Well...the blue room on the east side's free. Nice view of the street from there."

The blue room was a single with a twin bed. Hodya tried to give him one last chance. "Isn't there a double in the basement?"

And surprisingly, he took it. "Yeah, actually. No one's in there."

She smiled, and headed for the other stairs. "Come show me."

The basement had tall windows in deep-carved wells, as in a greystone house, and only had light for a few hours a day. The east side had a double room, and the west two singles -- Hodya hadn't heard many stories from Joel about couples showing up together, so it was probably rare, but some of the street kids he'd talked about were friends so tight that they were scared to sleep apart, afraid of losing each other in the night.

She set her bags on the bed and went to the window, drawing back the curtains in amazement. The window well was half-filled with a drift of snow, pressed against the glass like sand in an ant farm, a fine dusting of powder on the inner sill. There was a delicate draught that chilled her fingers, but the room wasn't cold. Snow held heat in like insulation, or so she'd heard. "Oh wow."

"The heating in here's kinda off-and-on," Joel said, feeling the radiator pipes. "You're sure you wouldn't rather have the blue room?"

She ignored him. "The snow is so wonderful. You don't see this in Toronto. And never in Israel, of course. It makes me miss Ottawa. Does it ever fill up with snow completely?"

"I'm not down here much."

Hodya turned back from the window and watched him for a moment, the awkward way he was standing -- his fists were balled up with the thumb tucked in, something foetal and instinctive, and he probably didn't know he was doing it. "Are you happy to see me, Joel?"

"Of course I am." It sounded more like an apology than reassurance. "Yes. I am."

"Sit down." She drew him down with her on the bed, sitting behind him, and let her cheek rest against his back for a few moments. Sometimes this worked; sometimes he was better if he wasn't looking at her, as if eye contact overwhelmed him. _This relationship is way too much work for you, and you know it,_ Hodya thought. But it felt cruel to give up because it was difficult, because he was shy, because they lived far apart. She felt like it was a seedling that needed her patience, her gentleness, the rains and the dew. 

Other guys took her out in Toronto. She'd had a few good dates with a drama student who was Jewish, a cute guy who was sweet but a little embarrassing and had a really dirty car. Some boring dates with another bio guy who seemed like he might get better with time. One great date with a guy in the army who then disappeared to Alberta. Not a bad crop from OK Cupid and a few parties. She kept trying with Joel because (when he let himself) he was funny to talk to, and she loved boys with freckles, and at just the right moments he looked at her like she was magic, and he cared about his causes with a passion that made her excited even when it wasn't her fight. _I am not just trying to take care of him. I'm not that cliché._ And anyway, she didn't take care of him. That had always been Paul's job.

 _Today's the last day,_ she told herself. _If I don't believe in this by the end of today, it's over._

She put her hands on his back, smoothing her palms across his shirt, feeling the topography of his thick scars underneath. His muscles tensed at first and then eased. She slid her arms around his waist and kissed him just below his ear, the corner of his jaw. 

After a moment he turned in her arms, some awkward rearranging that made them both laugh, and she moved to sit in his lap instead. In the beginning she'd had to apply all her tact to teach him how to kiss, but it had worked. _Like this. I'll do it first then you to me._ Worth the effort.

But after a few minutes she lost him again, and she pulled back, catching his eye. "Still here?"

"Sorry. Sorry, I really am, I'm just...preoccupied. Worried."

"About what?"

"Right now? Everything. We don't have to stop," he said, quieter. "I hate losing time when you're here. Are you tired?"

"Mm." Hodya decided to take him at his word. "You know what I'd like, I want a real _Pulp Fiction_ foot rub, can I ask you for that? My feet are gross right now but if I shower real quick, would you do that?"

"Of course." Joel always seemed relieved when she gave him specific assignments. "Bathroom's right there, I'll wait."

"You could join me." She smiled, but it died when she saw his expression. "Too much? Sorry, forget it."

"No, it's not too much, just -- it's not you. It's really, really me," he said. "Go ahead, I'll come in with you if I can get over it in time."

"Shh." She kissed him and took one of her bags into the bathroom with her, leaving the door open.

The worst part was that she could tell he _was_ trying. Through the blur of the shower curtain, she saw his figure on the bed, saw him get up a few times and then sit back down, saw him start to take his shirt off and then stop. She didn't know what he was wrestling with -- God or himself or something dark in his past. 

She took a little longer than she needed to, wanting to give him time to work it through, but he never did. When she stepped out and towelled off, she let him look (never any objections to that) and walked back into the bedroom nude, her hair still tied up and damp at the edges. She lay back down on the bed and put her feet in his lap. " _Mass_ age me, my good man. You wanted to come in with me, didn't you?"

He didn't answer right away. "Yeah. Just...felt weird."

"About what?"

This time an even longer silence, but then: "I felt like maybe you'd laugh at me."

"Uh, why?" That was a baffling answer. "When have I ever laughed at you for things like that? It was my idea."

"That's just what's always in my head, this tape of _you look stupid, you look stupid._ It's not anything you did."

"Okay. Yoel." She wiggled the toes of her right foot that he was rubbing. "Look at me. I will not laugh at you, ever, just for doing something affectionate that _I invited you to do._ If I do, you can charge me a fine. Fifty bucks a giggle. You believe me?"

"Yeah."

"Here's what I really want to know today. After you answer me this, we'll talk about whatever you're most worried about, but this is my worry. Do you -- we haven't had sex. We do stuff like this, but we don't have sex. Is that because of your religion or because you're not ready?"

"It's not...I don't know." He was still looking down at her foot. "I don't take a really hard line on the sexual teachings because I don't like being in a position where I have to think my friends are sinning for...for doing things that don't seem to cause harm. Things that don't even separate them from God. I think they're all right. I think _you're_ all right."

"Oh, I'm not going to hell? Cool."

"Yeah. But I feel like if _I_ did that, I might."

"Why, is there a higher standard for you than for me?"

"No. It's more like...I'm not as lucky and the universe hates me," Joel said, smiling at his own irrationality. "Like getting stopped by a cop, fifty other people run red lights ahead of you but you're the one who gets ticketed."

"Okay, so the answer is...it's mostly psychological blocks with some religious outer plating. Do I have that right?" said Hodya, offering him her left foot next. "Because I can deal with that if you're willing to work on it. I can't deal with this if you just think sex is bad, or if you don't want to do it at all until marriage -- that one's a fair enough rule if you want to go by it, but I don't. But if you just feel self-conscious, okay. I understand that."

"It's something like that. Yes. I know I have to work on it," he said. "I know it's not good enough."

"Doooon't. Don't." She made the time-out sign with her hands. "Subject change. What were you so preoccupied about, when we were kissing?"

He sighed, but said, "Neurocherche, still. The lab that's working on those telepaths."

"You're really convinced that something dirty's going on there, aren't you?" she said. "If that weren't an issue -- just bracket all that stuff -- would you feel confident about the treatment? Do you think it would help with the seizures?"

"I mentioned it to Dr. Xavier when I called him at Christmas, and he said the science is supposed to be pretty convincing. And I was going to email Dr. McCoy about it but I never sacked up and did it. But everyone who's an actual expert seems to think they're great."

"Then that's kind of a big deal, if your meds are failing. I know you've tried a lot of them, so surgery is probably next."

"I'm fine with them doing surgery, yeah," he said. "It's just...like yeah, Paul's not infallible, but he wasn't just picking up that the staff were bored or burned out or hating their jobs. He said some of them seemed _cruel_ , like they didn't care about who was in pain. That was the part that got me. And the telepath who got in my head was...they really hate it. They feel like a medical experiment."

Hodya shrugged and reached for the folded afghan, not purposely trying to spoil his view but beginning to get cold. "I've never dealt much with telepaths, so I guess I'll defer to you there."

"Like in pastoral training -- you were going to go to med school at first, so you know this -- you do a lot of visitation in the hospital. And it becomes clear to you, after awhile, without being told...you see what pain does to people. When a certain kind of man bursts into tears because the priest walked in, you know somehow that he hasn't cried in public in decades. You see the difference between someone who's in control and someone who's not. Someone who's reacting after years of not reacting, versus someone who's sensitive and will respond more to smaller things. You know?"

Hodya nodded, watching him.

"So that's how I could tell -- I could feel it -- that this telepath patient had been through a lot. It's not a scientific measurement, it's just what I think because I know what hospitals are like. I know what people in pain are like."

"You're a good person," Hodya said, not quite apropos of the conversation; she just felt like she'd been trying to push him too much. They needed to remember to tell each other when things seemed right, not just when they were wrong. "So what, are you going to report them or something?"

"I could try, but there aren't many legal strictures in place regarding medical treatment of mutants. Gatineau Accords."

"Ugh." Hodya was sympathetic. "I mean, I guess you could just walk in, Harry Houdini, but--"

He took this notion way too seriously. "Well, I couldn't get them _out_ , but yeah, I could at least find out what happened..."

"Joel, babe, no, don't start--"

"I'm serious, though. When we were there, Paul had to go looking around the building because I'd just had a lumbar puncture and the nurses were keeping an eye on me, but I could go back and do some recon--"

"No. No." She prodded him with her foot, but he just got up and went to turn on the lamp. "Joel! No. You said yourself, there's nothing you can do about this legally, so how does it help to know any more details about the lab? What will you do with that information?"

"Well..." That stopped him for a few seconds, but then he worked it through. "I might not be able to tell the government, but I can leak it to the press. I could do this right now -- you've been on planes all day, you can nap and I'll get a crew together to go to Repentigny. I'll be back by the time you wake up, and we can hang out for real, and I won't be so--"

Hodya had rolled over to put her face in the pillow while he was talking. "This plan is _terrible._ Look, I'm not going to stay here and _sleep_ while you do this."

"Great, then you can drive. You know more about lab stuff than I do, anyway, you can help us figure out where to look."

 _This boy is willing to do anything rather than have the Talk with you,_ Hodya thought to herself. And it was hard to protest seriously: she liked his stories of protesting and getting arrested, his mutant activist talk, and she'd encouraged it often enough. The idea of leaking a story about an unethical lab to the press was kind of too cool to pass up. "Are you going to be careful? Keep it really low-key?"

"Of course."

"Oy, fine, let me get some clothes on..."

* * *

Joel got the whole house together in the kitchen, summoning them the traditional way by using the TEST button on the smoke detector. Grace, Arlette, Nour, Prawn, and Jeanne-Marie were there tonight, and they all gathered around the kitchen island with Joel, Hodya, and Paul.

"We should invest in an intercom system," Paul said.

"It doesn't come up that often," said Joel. "All right. Um, we don't need full consensus for this meeting because I'm just asking some people to opt in to a project if they want to. It's not some kind of litmus test, it's not required. This is a non-violent action, so if you think you might lose control when you're scared, this one probably isn't for you."

"What's going on?" Grace asked.

"We're going to trespass on private property and try to get some documentation of mutant rights abuses in a lab setting. Some of the security guards might be armed."

Paul sighed. "I don't know how smart this is."

"That's why I'm trying to organise. If nobody wants to go then we'll drop it and rethink."

"I'm out," said Prawn, a hint of disgust in his voice. "This is fucking ridiculous. I thought you were the ones supposed to keep _me_ out of trouble."

"Okay. Good, in fact -- you stay here. Hold down the fort, or whatever. Who else wants to stay?"

Slowly, looking down at the tabletop, Grace raised her hand. She was pregnant, of course, so that was no surprise. 

Nour raised their hand too. "I mean I would, but my powers don't exactly have a stun setting. I don't want to have an accident."

"I could go," said Arlette. She had a telepathic power to compel people to do things if she could get physical contact. Which would be great on almost any other job.

"The guards wear telepathic disruptors, so you might be limited in what you can do," Joel said. "But still, sure, we could use you."

He looked at Jeanne-Marie, who looked lost, rigid, no eye contact. She shook her head. "I'm not -- I can't go along with this. I don't want to break the law."

"Okay." Joel couldn't think of any lawful way to do what he was planning. He was wagering a lot on a hunch. "All right. Arlette, Paul, and me." He turned to Hodya. "Are you coming?"

Hodya took a deep breath and nodded. "Okay. Sure."

"Meeting over?" said Prawn, and one by one the others drifted off. Prawn was his own problem, of course.

That was when Joel realised that he needed something to take the edge off. He felt like he'd stuck a pin in an electrical outlet. In the bathroom on the third floor, he unlocked the medicine cabinet to get out the Xanax, breaking a tablet in half. 

Sitting on the edge of the tub, he wondered what exactly he was going to do, what he suspected, what he was risking. No ideas. Not enough information. Not enough energy -- you needed a lot of fuel to overcome the gravity of the everyday, to stop seeing doctors as helpful and governments as harmless, to plan for anything other than eating and sleeping and working and consuming. All the thrust and lift of the saints, whatever made Clare cut her hair off and Francis sell his clothes, that was the real miracle. Never mind the money, never mind the healed demoniacs and tamed wolves. Their feet left the ground the moment they took that first impossible risk.

* * *

New Year's Eve dinner was a rather desultory affair, since a Catholic Worker house divided against itself cannot cook. Nobody got the roast in on time, and the coconut Thai curry for the vegans in attendance came out with soft, overcooked vegetables. Paul's mealworms and sake-soaked raw shrimp came out great, but no one much wanted to share them. (Ox, who was there for dinner, ate one of the mealworms on a dare and then disappeared into the bathroom for awhile.) Joel even dispensed with the grace, half standing up and then slowly easing down again, staring down at his plate. He evidently felt guilty for forcing the kids to make a decision, and didn't want to bring the topic up again. Paul, on the other hand, thought it was better to maintain some semblance of discipline. _Fine, I'll be the tough dad if I have to._ He got up, said the blessing in French, with a firm "Amen" to declare the matter settled, and sat down again.

Around nine, after a few dispirited toasts with sparkling grape juice and Spanish champagne, dinner dribbled to a finish. Paul put his boots on and hunted for his hat and gloves in the hall closet. Arlette made sandwiches, which seemed both practical and a little ridiculous. Hodya sat on the stairs while Paul leaned in the doorway, waiting for Joel and Arlette to be ready.

"You do this sort of thing often?" she asked, pulling her hair back with an elastic taken off her zipper.

It was a joke; she knew as well as he did what they did at St-Jean-de-Dieu most of the time. Paul smiled a bit to show some goodwill; he felt bad about the airport thing. "Oh, not in a long while. We used to chain ourselves to the War Museum gates sometimes, pour blood on CRIM records at the Clermont Building here in town."

"You're kidding."

"Aren't you?"

"I don't know anymore. I used to think I understood this place -- the country, I mean. When I first came here, what I liked best about Canada was how, hm, unnecessary all of that stuff seemed. No, that's not the word I want. Activism is always necessary. But it didn't seem urgent, there were no...moral emergencies, I guess. In Israel everything's an emergency all the time. Everything's a big fucking deal. I'm trying to get my foot in the door for Canadian citizenship because I want to live in a place that's quieter about everything. I don't want to have kids who'll have to serve in the army. Now I'm not sure anymore that this place is any better than home." She sighed. "I'm not making myself very clear. Probably still jet-lagged."

"You really can stay here, if you want." Joel came around the corner, adjusting the collar of his coat. "I don't even know if we'll get anything done tonight. There'll probably be other chances."

"I want to go with you," Hodya said, standing up and kissing him lightly. Paul still wasn't used to seeing that, and thought that Joel wasn't accustomed to getting kissed either. Just a quick, sharp burst of _oh, we do this, that's right, I'd forgotten._ Paul picked up the smell of shame, like cooking beets, and a sharper tang of fear, but...well, he liked it, that smell too was present. _Don't think about it,_ Paul told himself, but he couldn't stop himself from noticing, from perceiving, and then from thinking. No control. 

Arlette came out of the kitchen, sandwiches completed, and they left in the little blue Volvo with the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror. The drive to Repentigny was long, the roads icy, and Paul was glad that Arlette was there to drive, even though it meant listening to some bad French chanson pop.

It was a little after ten-thirty when they got to Neurocherche, whose parking lot was almost empty.

"We shouldn't park there, right?" said Arlette. "I mean, I assume we're worried about getting caught?"

"Kind of. Yes." Joel peered through the iced-over side window. The lab was right on the highway, no side streets or driveways to make them more inconspicuous. "Wait, no. Park there. There's no place else. If someone comes out to chase you away you can probably reach his wrist to convince him not to, right?"

"Sure." Arlette took a spot in the furthest corner of the lot, turned off the motor, and glanced over at the others. "Well?"

"Well. Okay. You stay here. Getaway driver." Joel took off his gloves, wiped his palms on his coat. Sweaty palms, so heroic. "I'll go in first, see if I can open the doors from inside. Hodya can try to find something in the records, I guess? I know they have some stuff on paper, even if you can't get into the computer system."

"What am I supposed to be doing?" said Paul.

"I don't know. Go with Hodya?"

"For what, protection?" Arlette said, snickering at the idea. "A hundred fifty pounds of danger, that's Paul."

"Can we not?" said Joel. "Paul goes with Hodya because he'll be able to sniff out what's wrong, like last time. Anything goes wrong, go passive and let them call the police, because you're probably better off with real cops than security guys. We'll get you out of safety ASAP. Arlette, leave after two hours."

"Leave...?" Arlette sounded unconvinced that this was the best plan ever, and Paul had to agree. But nobody else had any better ideas.

Joel waited for Arlette, but when she trailed off, he nodded and said, "Okay. Uh, see you in a bit. I hope."

He disappeared.

Paul and Hodya got out and walked across the icy parking lot. They didn't hurry -- running over ice like this would have been dumb, and Paul had a weird feeling of being under surveillance. There might well be cameras on the parking lot, so that was a healthy intuition. Better not to attract any more attention.

"Nervous?" Hodya murmured to him.

"Fuck yes."

"Okay. Good. Me too."

They said nothing more to each other until they reached the building. The main doors were locked, and Paul saw a keypad lit up inside -- no opening those from the inside or the outside without the code, at least not without Niko or someone else good at electronic subterfuge. Prawn, once again, wasn't here when they needed him. Keypads were sensible for anyplace that had "flight risks", like St. Rita's.

The sound of metal on concrete nearly gave Paul a heart attack, but investigating it he only saw a plain metal side door standing open around the corner of the building. Nobody was visible inside or outside; Joel had found the way in.

It was, apparently, a maintenance room, completely dark and full of equipment that smelled of metal and motor oil. Hodya held Paul's hand as they picked their way across to the inner door, where a thin line of light shone. "You're bright," she whispered.

He was. He should have worn the Dermacolor, but it didn't block out all the luminescence, not in darkness. And for once it was useful, a dim bluish glow just enough to keep them from tripping on the snowblower.

The door to the maintenance room was propped with one of Joel's gloves, which Paul carefully replaced as he closed the door behind them again. He and Hodya came out in a dark corridor that didn't smell particularly interesting, and they wandered for several minutes before they passed an office door that twigged Paul's interest. He could smell nothing, but something...

One door was marked "fire door - alarm will sound", but something made Paul stop. When he first came to work here, his supervisor had rapped the glass with his knuckles and said, _"The guys in accounting use this door a lot so the alarm's disabled. Not a good idea in a real emergency, but handy to get to the basement when the elevator's down."_ A lot of the business of security was lies: the visible cameras that were turned off, the hidden cameras that were real, the burly guards who didn't give a shit about loss prevention or anything less than a knife fight in the waiting room. Neurocherche was tougher, but they kept their loopholes open too.

Hodya nudged him. "How did you know this door was okay?"

"I didn't." The phantom pop between his ears was easier this time, because he'd been expecting it. "We're getting help from the telepaths. Just go with it if an idea seems to come to you out of nowhere, okay? I'll explain more later."

At the bottom door, which was not locked, Paul began to be something more than nervous or panicky. It was more distant, like reading a newspaper article or watching a movie, and knowing that the world had a rotten patch. More than a patch. And he was responsible in some way, but worst of all, he could turn his back very easily. Much better when circumstances forced you to do the right thing. Paul wondered if he was getting the feeling from Hodya, or from something residual in the building, or if perhaps it was his own.

But when they opened the door, nothing very terrible was in evidence. No wives of Bluebeard hung up on the walls, certainly. Just a big concrete basement full of servers and computer terminals. Paul turned the lights on, and Hodya got a peculiar look in her eye and walked straight to the nearest terminal.

She tapped out a password rapidly when the box popped up, and Paul stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. "What was it, what was the password? I'll write it down before we forget it again."

She spelled it out, her voice oddly colourless. **Feu1ll3_dErab13** , not any more high-security than Paul's gmail password, but good to know at least.

Then Hodya twitched slightly and blinked at the screen. "Whoa. Okay--my ears popped, that was _weird._ Let me see if I can find anything good to read later. You watch the door."

Paul waited, antsy, but the building was silent. After about twenty minutes of reading, Hodya said, "This might be...oh, good, I found patient intake. Huh. This person had Sturge-Weber Syndrome."

"Which is?"

"It's, um, congenital. Seizures, port-wine birthmark. It's rare. There are notes from the lumbar puncture, attached...'positive for 143 factor, low potency.'"

"What does that mean?"

"I have no idea. I'm just..." She read on. "This patient's another telepath, apparently."

"Telepaths sure seem inclined to have broken brains."

"They don't, actually. Not according to the stats I've read. We don't have very good data. But telepathy's definitely not common enough for this to be coincidence."

"What did they want with Joel, then?"

She shrugged. "Maybe they're actually treating seizures, I don't know. As a sideline. Or maybe they were interested in mutants immune to telepathy, or maybe they're testing sensitivity rather than read/write ability. But this note from the lumbar puncture is weird. 'Patient CSF-143 results on rhesus monkeys.'"

"They're keeping monkeys here?"

"It's a lab, Paul. Sort of, anyway. But what do I know, I go to U of T." Hodya tapped the arrow button again, and her eyes widened. "How much time do we have left?"

He checked his watch. "Half an hour."

"Right." She unzipped the pocket of her coat and got out her thumb drive. "I'll get downloading."

"The whole thing?"

"Everything that'll fit. If I'd had an external HD with me that would've been cool, but this'll have to do. And I'd still have to read through all this to have any real clue what they're up to here, beyond -- it just looks weird." She plugged the thumb drive into the USB port, dumped the files there, and waited impatiently while they transferred. When it was done, she disconnected it and put the thumb drive back in her pocket, zipping it up carefully. "Okay. That's as much as I can take. We should go."

* * *

The whiteness was still there, Joel had learned. The _seeing_ was some other level, above or below the whiteness, some layer he'd never known before this year. It was comforting, almost, to know that he still had the snowblind emptiness, since it had taken so long for him to learn what it meant.

But he left the whiteness alone, and let himself go unblind, seeing everything. Fore and aft, above and beneath, more than the brain should have been able to process -- but his brain was gone, his skin was gone, his eyes and ears and flesh and bone all gone. Nothing left, and nothingness had no limitations. _Nada nada nada._

He could move through everything easily, occasionally coming back to material being in order to get his phone out and snap a picture, there and gone again, but there wasn't much on view that looked obviously damning. It was just a lab, just a clinical institution. 

A ward. He knew wards. Beds four to a room, bored guards at either end of the well-lit corridor. Half-asleep, he thought, but wouldn't test it tonight. He drifted through the rooms until he found a patient who was awake, a gleam of eyes in the darkness.

He faded into presence, barely visible but not solid, and crossed the room to stand by the girl's bed. She looked a bit like his young cousin Clare, curly red hair and sharp, fierce features. When she saw him she lifted her head, probably expecting a nurse on checks and not used to anyone standing there for so long. "What?"

"I need information about this place," he whispered back.

She squinted, then sat up and scooted back slowly towards the head of the bed, not taking her eyes off him. "You're not real."

"I'm real," he said.

"I can't sense you. Even when people wear an inhibitor I can sense them. And I can see past you."

"I'm here, I'm just not tangible." He moved his hand through the wall to show her. "Just a mutant, same as you. How old are you?"

"Sixteen," she said warily, adjusting the white hospital blanket around herself. "You didn't know that?"

He shook his head, and she let her shoulders relax a bit. "Usually when I see things, they try to impress me with how much they know. They ask questions they already know the answers to."

"You see things a lot?"

"Not in a while. And usually I can sense them. They seem real." She reached over to the bedside tray for a styrofoam cup of water.

"Not since the surgery?" he guessed.

"Uh-huh."

"Schizophrenia?"

"That's the diagnosis," she said with dry disdain. "No one was sure. They're probably wrong. I'm too young."

"Kinda." Joel wondered if perhaps the surgery had deadened some unusual aspect of the girl's powers, rather than removing a symptom of mental illness. He didn't even know what her powers were. "Why are you still here, if you're not seeing things anymore?"

"I still have symptoms. They say they're getting better. Listening to me. Everybody's always listening to me. Of course, now they'll think I'm losing it again, since I'm talking to nothing. Almost nothing. My roommate will hear but she won't talk. Doesn't talk. Smart not to say too much." The girl winked at him solemnly -- she'd started to talk faster, sounding a little agitated, but evidently she was acting. She was still sitting composed on the bed, sipping from her water. So probably someone _was_ listening in on her, but not watching a video feed. "I'm happy to help with a little interdimensional corporate espionage, though. What do you want to know?"

He lowered his voice, even though he knew he wasn't very audible in this state. The other patients probably couldn't hear him. "I need to know if they're hurting you here."

"Me specifically? Everyone? We're all hurt, I can tell you that much. _They dress the wounds of my poor people as though they're nothing._ I haven't got anything to do with that. We couldn't tell you if we're getting hurt. We wouldn't know what you meant."

"You specifically, everyone, yeah. If anyone's getting hurt here, I want to know. They can't keep it secret from everyone. Do they do things to you that seem weird, things that other doctors don't do?"

The girl shrugged. "They go in through the back like old vaudevillians -- in through the kitchens, in between the butcher's blocks. No one else does that." And she bent her head and lifted up her hair to show him a dark circle on the back of her neck, barely visible in the moonlight streaming in through the window.

The circle looked raw, almost like a burn, and there was no dressing on it. "Who did that?"

"Who _doesn't_ do it? I'm not an expert, but everybody works for somebody. And everyone talks for somebody. Simon says do this, Simon says do that."

Joel couldn't put that together, whatever kind of code she was trying to get across. "And what happens when...when they do this to you?"

"They line up and get me in their sights and then I shoot. Simon says and I have to do it. I don't do it if he doesn't say." She rubbed the spot on the back of her neck. "I don't like him. He makes us pretend we do."

Mind control of some kind, perhaps? Abuse, obviously? "Does anyone get discharged from this place?"

"Simon takes a few of them. Other freaks, people like you, the cripples, legally headblind -- they get to go home. We're the special ones. The medical mysteries."

"And why can't you use your powers on them?" he asked, remembering that psychic concussion one of the patients had given him. Maybe it was even her, and maybe she would have recognised his mind if he'd been solid.

She leaned close, automatically reaching for his arm to steady herself but overbalancing when she passed through it. She lowered her voice to the softest possible whisper.

"If someone got close enough," she told him, "someone with no inhibitor on -- they can scramble my signals, it's no good trying to mess with them -- but someone headblind, yeah, I could do it. Your friend the French boy, he and I came pretty close. If he'd got through the vents. Him and the science girl, they're here too. I helped them a little. But I haven't been able to bring anyone close enough to help us. What I need from you, okay, is I have to have someone get the inhibitors off the guards first. With a little more help...I could do it. I know I could."

Joel looked over his shoulder at the other beds, and thought of the other rooms on the ward. Yes, it could probably be done. Joel could remove the inhibitor equipment from the guards at minimal risk to himself, and presumably the patients could take over the prison break from there, manipulating the mentally vulnerable staff into opening doors, turning off alarms, and deleting records. But if something went wrong -- how did the "Simon says" phenomenon actually work? Maybe all the patients would suddenly turn against them in response to some secret command from the authorities.

And if he got them out...then what?

What would Joel do with thirty-odd kids? How would he even get them back into the city in one four-door Volvo sedan? No. The logistics weren't right yet, and there was no point in rolling the dice when the odds were so low.

"I can't do it tonight," he told her, forcing himself to meet her eyes. "Not tonight. But I'll find a way. I promise."

She sank back on the bed. "Sure. Whatever."

"No, I will. What's your name?"

The girl held up her left hand, the wristband visible in the light from the window. _Morley, Kathleen._ "You?"

Joel had always thought mutant nicknames were a little silly, or at least not his style, but he saw now that _noms de guerre_ were useful -- "Simon" might well be able to pump Kathleen for information. Coming up with a good alias in a few seconds was harder than it seemed, though, and he ended up choosing a name from his theology textbooks. "Uh...Richard McBrien."

"I'll be waiting," said Kathleen, and she lay back down on the bed, pulling the blankets up. "Nothing else I can do."

Thirty-two mutants on the ward. St. John of God held a maximum of fifteen. Maybe a few more, if he put out sleeping bags on the floor. Where else could he send them? St. Rita's and St. Christina's in Ottawa were stuffed to the gills, and had been for years. How many could Professor Xavier take? Would the kids even be safe with their parents, if any or all of them were welcome at home? How many were minors, how many were of age? 

Logistics. Logistics were going to kill him.

In the car, Hodya and Paul were waiting with Arlette. Everyone alive. _Good job, great leader._ Hodya twisted around in the front seat to show them a USB drive. "Exhibit A," she said.

"Thank God," Joel said, leaning forward to rest his forehead against the back of the front seat. "Good. Someone got something done, then. I'm glad."

As they drove out on the highway, Arlette repeatedly glancing up in the rearview mirror, Paul leaned forward between the front seats. "Hey, it's twelve-seventeen. _Bonne année et bonne santé._ "

"Happy New Year," said Joel. "Sorry the party isn't more fun."

"Oh, I wasn't expecting much. That's life as a charity worker."

"Happy New Year," Hodya said to Joel, turning again in the seat to face him with a smile.

"They might still be on the second _Back to the Future_ when we get home," Arlette said hopefully. "Although the champagne's probably gone. And the drunken groping will be over with."

"What drunken groping?" Joel demanded.

"I'm just saying, if you're not there then they're probably having drunken groping. It's traditional."

"Kissing is traditional. Groping is assault."

"Well, I don't mean groping against anyone's will," Arlette said impatiently. "Some people like a grope. 'Specially Beaubier."

"All right, let's move on."

"She likes what she likes. Ten bucks says she and Prawn made out after a few drinks." Arlette leaned back and flicked on the radio. "Anyone want a sandwich?"

* * *

They pulled up to St. John of God House at twenty past one. The lights were all burning downstairs, but the TV in the main sitting room was silent. All Joel could hear was a low mutter of conversation from the kitchen. As much as he'd tried to stimulate the sort of round-table discussions that Catholic Worker houses were known for, the kids in the house didn't often stay up until the small hours of the morning just talking. They were too disparate, with no common mission, and anyway, there should have been another _Back to the Future_ movie left.

Prawn met Paul and Joel in the kitchen doorway. "Something's happened," he said. "Jeanne-Marie's gone."

"Gone where?" Arlette's bet was the first thing Joel thought of. "What did you do?"

Prawn seemed too frayed at the edges to even get insulted. _Tanné_ , as they said in Quebec. Fed up, annoyed, worn out, but literally _weather-beaten_ , like old siding on a house. "I didn't do nothing, mate. Ottawa. Department H. They took her."

" _Tonight?_ They came for her _tonight?_ " Joel said. "What the hell is it with them and holidays? They're government, why are they even working? When did this happen?"

"About an hour after you left." Prawn rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. "She...hang on, I might have given you the wrong end of the stick here. There wasn't any struggle. I said 'they took her' but what I meant was...they came to pick her up, and she went. No one hurt her. They let me stay."

Paul let out a long, shaky breath. "They're watching the house."

"No." Joel went into the kitchen and turned on the water for the kettle.

"They waited for us to leave and they came for her, Joel. Or would you rather believe that a government agency runs like a 7-11? They came for Prawn and Jeanne-Marie on Christmas because we'd be distracted. They followed the car from the house."

_"No."_

"Well, what other explanation is there? Luck? Here's what I think," said Paul. "I think they have mutants with long-range psi-powers watching the house, and probably other places in the cities where mutants pass through. That wouldn't be hard. Or they could have conventional spies watching, or bugs, I don't know. They lie in wait for the kids and get them as soon as they leave your sphere of influence -- either they don't believe your rhetoric about non-violence or they're afraid of your political connections. Both, maybe. They at least know you're not afraid of making a big public stink, after that shitstorm with the kid hiding out in the church. Why else would Heather McNeil have made such a big deal about that when she was talking to you? And they know kids like Prawn are dangerous even if you and I aren't. But we don't do much if it doesn't happen on our doorstep, and they know that too, if they've been paying attention. I bet this explains a few disappearances in the last year or so."

"Paul--" Joel stopped himself and lowered his voice. "Let's not run full-tilt into a conspiracy theory."

"Well, we know they _have_ watched the house, because that guy followed Prawn and Jeanne-Marie already, at Christmas. And they weren't shy about buttonholing you in the hospital."

"Okay. True. But they asked, and they took no for an answer. It still doesn't follow from there that there are spies on the house all the time--"

"Then where's Jeanne-Marie? Where's Niko? Where are Darren and Rishi and Colombe and all the others?"

"They're human beings and they made their choices," Joel said. "I'm not their dad. I'm not their boss or their teacher or their parole officer or their confessor. Whether they go west to work on the oil rigs or take a job in Ottawa -- it's them, it's their own lives. I don't believe any of them got snatched off the street."

"Joel, you're too smart for this shit. Some of them are minors, they're all oppressed, and their economic options are very fucking limited. How free are their choices? The government is preying on them. And why not? They're easy pickings. That is a fact. Are they using mutants to watch us? I don't know for sure, but I'm not going to rule it out. It fits the facts. And it wouldn't be the first time the government kept an eye on activists."

Joel sat down at the table and rested his head on his arms. "Okay. Okay, just...maybe, yeah."

Prawn had said nothing throughout the argument, but now he said, "You think Jeanne-Marie called them?"

"Why would she do that?"

"Why not?" Prawn played with the edge of a placemat. "She's not afraid of Department H, not like you are. And meanwhile you're running off to fuck around in laboratories at night like some Animal Liberation Front activist. I think she trusts them more than you. I bet her weird nun school taught her to respect the authorities and take a dim view of leftists doing B&E."

The Xanax had worn off. "Did you see her make a phone call?"

"No. But--"

"We'll assume Paul's right, then, and that there might be surveillance. Safer that way. Or fuck, maybe they're watching the house _and_ Jeanne-Marie hates me. Lord knows that's plausible enough."

"Naturally it's all about you," said Paul. "We should talk about this in the morning."

"One more thing, though," Prawn said. "This might not mean anything, maybe just a coincidence. But after you left, before Department H came, this old guy came to the door asking for you. He left a Christmas card."

That was a little weird, Joel thought. The neighbours on Rue Sainte Famille weren't hostile, but they weren't very chummy either. "Old guy?"

Prawn shrugged. "Yeah, I d'know how old. White hair. I didn't think twice about it until after Department H came. Card's on the desk in the office, any rate."

"Huh. Okay." It could be nothing, but Joel just wanted to get to bed.

"We'll be smarter in the morning," Hodya said with a yawn. "Come on."

As they left the kitchen, Paul noticed that Joel was headed downstairs with Hodya. "Oho. Hot revolutionary love."

"Shut up, Paul."

In the room in the basement, Hodya undressed, her back to Joel. "You know we don't have to do anything you don't want to."

"Yeah, I know." He started unbuttoning his shirt, to make the nakedness less one-sided.

"And honestly, I'm not much in the mood. I'm fucking exhausted and kind of scared." She pulled a worn out t-shirt over her head, a black shirt with _yihyeh b'seder_ written on it in Hebrew, one of the modern slang terms he knew. It meant _it'll be okay_ , she had told him years ago, but you could say it even when things were definitely not going to be okay. "So don't feel like you're disappointing me."

"That's good." Knot in his laces. Twenty years of untying shoelaces and suddenly he couldn't do it.

"Oh, well, if it's good then who am I to argue?"

He was down to his boxers and one shoe with that stubborn knot. The room was cold. "Should we get the grilling over with? I'm not impotent. I'm not gay. I didn't get fucked by Cardinal Law."

"Listen, you don't want to talk about it, and I am _by no means_ sure that I want to talk about it either," she said, pulling on her pajama pants and sitting on the bed. "But you never want to talk about it, and it's New Year's and you didn't even think about kissing me. I know we weren't partying or anything, but there was a moment and you knew--" She stopped herself. "Yoel. This is not working. We've been trying, and it's not working. If you could talk more about your problems, maybe it would work better, but you just don't. I have to hound you all the time like a brassy reporter in a comic book. You think I like that? Because I do _not._ "

"I'm sorry--"

"No, no. Just listen. I do not think you're impotent. I'll be blunt: you get boners when we make out, so there's that. But boners are weird, so maybe you're gay. You always tell me you're not, but I see a _situation_ where you might be, and you might feel like you have to lie about it." She held out her hand to stop him from interrupting, raising her eyebrows. "You're very religious. You're very hung up about sex, and -- apparently -- you were seriously considering the priesthood. Good reasons to be closeted. Good reasons to maybe hold onto a relationship with a girl even though it's DOA."

"I wasn't doing that. I wouldn't use you just to stay in the closet, Hodya," he said, still picking at the knot in his laces, but he was flushed with humiliation, burning hot, almost close to tears. "I wanted this. I just couldn't do it, I wasn't what you need."

"Don't start a tailspin, babe, okay?" Hodya said, reaching out to touch his shoulder but pulling back when he flinched. "Here's the other situation I see, where you might want to hide and deny it. Paul is important to you, that's clear. You call him your partner, and that's fine. You can have a friend that close, whether you're gay or straight or bi or asexual. But he is _in_ love with you. You even know that, I think."

"Yeah," Joel whispered. "He's...I know about it, yeah. He's crossing fingers that shouldn't be crossed."

"Right. So maybe you don't want it out there that, sure, maybe you are attracted to guys but you're not into him. You don't want to hurt him."

"That's not what's going on." He kept fumbling with his shoe. "You know what? In the Gospels, there's a Greek word that means a stumbling-block. I forget the Hebrew. But the Greek comes from the verb 'to limp.' René Girard said that a limping man, seen from behind, seems to be constantly wrestling with his own shadow. A stumbling-block is something that repels you and attracts you both, and you can't leave it alone. In English we call it a scandal."

"So what scandalises you?" she said. "Me? Sex?"

"Sex does. Yeah." He kicked off his shoe, the knot still stuck in it. "A scandal isn't something shocking. Scandal is something haunting. Something you can't get away from, a double-bind, something you want and try not to want. But the trying not to want isn't good enough either. I don't think it comes from religion alone, it comes from religion bouncing off society. Society telling you, 'You could be loved, if you were some other way than the way you are.' But the minute you try to change and be what they want you to be, they say no, that's not right, you're just supposed to be that way naturally. And you can't give up on the idea of being loved, because even if you could handle that with your heart, even if you could live without it, that would mean you're broken too. So you're tied up. You know?"

Hodya shook her head. "I don't understand. Say more, I want to follow you."

He paused for a long time, then said, "I think what I mean is that I've been tied up and tripping over myself for so long that I don't know what I would do or what I would want if I felt free. There's a famous image of Our Lady, a famous painting of Mary. My advisor at l'Institut Pastorale has a print of it in his office. It shows her with a piece of ribbon that's full of knots, and she's untying all of them. That's the highest thing you can ask for, from a being that's close to God, right? Get them to untangle all the fucking knots in your life. And I've been waiting, but she's not done with mine yet. Is that clearer?"

"Yeah." Hodya's voice was thick. This was as clear as Joel could get, she knew. She didn't have to follow his emotional logic completely in order to understand the bottom line: whatever was holding him back, it was something that he couldn't fight. He knew it and so did she. _It's all over but the crying._ "Thank you. Thanks for telling me, I'm glad to finally hear that."

"And it's not fair to you. Us like this."

"No," she said, taking a breath and wiping her cheeks. "It's not fair to me. Not even fair to you."

"I can go," he said, bending over to pick his shoe up.

"Only if you want to be in your own bed," Hodya said, pulling a tissue out of the box on the bedside table. "I'm not mad, Yoel. I knew this was going to happen soon, and it feels...it feels less lonely to know that it's not just me being an asshole, you know? We really did have a big goddamn problem, right? It wasn't all in my head."

It made him laugh, wetly. "Oh Christ, no, definitely not."

"We're still friends. We can be."

"I'd like that." 

"Will you do something for me?" she said, wiping her face again with the balled-up tissue. "Kiss me one last time, for goodbye. New Year's Eve, not too late. I just...want to be able to remember the last kiss between us."

"Hodya..." Yeah, he was definitely crying by now too. Great. He moved over on the bed and kissed her, his hand on her damp cheek. Just a kiss, like all the other ones. He lingered, but there was only so long a kiss like that could last, a quiet one. 

She pulled back first, and tried to give him a smile. "Good. Thanks. We'll try to talk tomorrow, yeah? And maybe we'll be able to be nicer about it."

"Yeah. I'm sorry I did this when you're jetlagged," Joel said, putting his shirt back on. "Get lots of sleep."

"You too, I don't want you having more seizures. Goodnight," she said, as if they were on the phone. 

"Goodnight," he said back, and closed the door behind him.

The house was dark and quiet, everyone gone to bed, and Joel didn't go upstairs to his room right away. He went to the kitchen and saw that the kettle was still plugged in, automatically shut off, one of his pointless tics when there was a crisis. His mother's family all did that, _put the kettle on_ , Maritimer instinct. Even if you forgot the tea. He unplugged it and got a glass of water, wandering into the office.

The blue paper envelope was sitting on the desk, fully addressed, with a return address in the corner (three houses down on the same street) but no stamp. Joel opened it. A pretty card with a drawing of a winter forest on it, a single bright red cardinal in one of the trees. 

The inside was blank, but there was a message in sharp, angular hand-writing:

  
_Do come by and visit at your earliest convenience._  
_Cloak and dagger nonsense an unfortunate necessity,_  
_but we're watching H., not you. Need to talk about_  
_Dudley, but we're probably the lot you dislike least._  
_Happy new year & so on._  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Arlette Truffaut (Murmur) actually is a comics character. Weird, huh?
> 
> The bit about scandal at the end is an homage to gay Catholic theologian James Alison.


	8. Snakes and Ladders

_If honour were profitable, everybody would be honourable._  
–St. Thomas More

Envy was not green, as Paul knew perfectly well. It was a burnt purple, like the beached remains of a jellyfish, dead and dry in the light but lambent in the darkness, and he couldn't hide from it. Envy, specifically: Père Gilles had always defined that word carefully, and corrected Paul when he used it to mean jealous. "You can only be envious of what you don't have. Jealousy is a fear of losing what you do have. Jealousy is defensive, envy offensive."

Paul had always been envious before. He'd had friends once, and he lost them, and yes, he was envious thereafter when he saw them walking home from school. Ostentatiously crossing to the other side of the street when they passed his house. That was textbook stuff, even if he couldn't put a name to it at the time -- he wasn't even angry at them, or bitter, he just wanted very badly to be back there with them. He wanted what they had. He used to test himself: _if you could be human again, and they asked you to, would you forgive them? If it meant things could be just like they were?_ Yes, yes, absolutely. And it wasn't because Paul was so very holy, just because he had nothing and needed them. 

And in French _envie_ had that meaning of pure want: _J'ai envie d'être normal encore._

So this was envy, not jealousy, because he couldn't lose what he didn't have.  
He felt petty, but he didn't want to deal with the shitstorm of Joel and Hodya sleeping together (finally) when their relationship was already shaking apart. They weren't in love; maybe once, _maybe_ , but not now. Paul knew what real love smelled like. It was delicate and solid like tofu -- you could almost miss it, but it was there, a constant undertone. Joel and Hodya smelled like low tide, silty and dark, full of rot and minerals, maybe some bottle glass and clamshells there to catch the light but everything else washed out and waiting.

That was always the problem, that he could see and smell these things so clearly and yet he could never see the reasons.

He got up at seven, having slept only a little during the night, and found Joel in the kitchen with a cup of tea. The familiar yellow mug, _Man Changes Into Thunderbird._

_"Salut."_ Joel pushed the teapot closer to the centre of the table. Sugar and cream were already set out, although Joel always took his black, and Paul knew it was a sort of apology.

"So how was it?" Paul asked. He hadn't wanted to be crass about it, only friendly and curious like an ordinary guy _(what the hell do ordinary guys do? do you even know anymore?)_. It came out as a taunt anyway.

Joel shrugged, turning the folded front section of the newspaper over. "How was what?"

"You and Hodya."

"Me and Hodya breaking up, you mean? It was super. Thanks for asking."

It was a piece of emotional data that Paul hadn't been expecting, for once. He could pick up the same old, rotted out bonds as last night, Joel and Hodya's connection like a banana peel in the final blackened stages of ripe and decay, somewhere between rubbery and brittle. But there was a flush of something fresher, something sweeter over that...and yeah, he'd mistaken it for sex. Relief, good pain, catharsis. It smelled like coconut water, clean and gentle, a little like a vacation and a little like the taste of the human body. "You broke _up_?"

Joel glanced up from the paper and smiled. "What, you couldn't tell? Do your powers need a tune-up or something?"

"Look, some things smell really similar -- you broke _up_?"

"It's not that surprising. We just..." He shrugged. "She's tired of the weird limbo we were in, and why not? We talked, we figured out that we're basically not..." He hesitated, then barrelled on through. "Not compatible sexually, okay, it happens."

Paul let out a long breath, shaking his head as he opened the sugar box to drop a few cubes into the bottom of his cup. His mutation made him honest, but it also made him blunt; there was no way to make people believe him if he said tactful things while his real emotions were coursing all over his skin. It meant that he wasn't so quick to find the conventional phrases, even when he did feel bad for people, but he said to Joel, "That's gotta hurt. We all knew it was coming, but it...still really sucks. Sorry, man." 

"Yeah. It's the right way for things to go, though. I can be a better friend to her without this hanging over my head," said Joel. "And vice versa, probably. I'm off the air, where that stuff is concerned. People who like each other without touching each other are friends, that's it. I should have broken it off long ago."

"Don't say 'off the air,' you sad-sack," Paul said, pouring the tea over the sugar cubes and watching their slow dissolution. "You're not broken."

"I didn't say broken. Asexual people exist, they're not broken."

"Right, but is that actually your label? Or are you just trying to score a point off me?"

Joel thought about that for a minute or so and then said, "No, that's probably not my label. I don't know what the right one is."

Paul let him off the hook. "Well, you'll figure something out. You're still my favourite person in the whole kitchen, you know that?"

"Out of all the people on the entire first floor, you're in my top three," Joel answered, smiling a little. "I would've come back up to our room to sleep, but I just -- wanted to be alone for awhile."

"Sure, yeah. Did you try the famous basement couch, with all its Persian pomps?"

"Nah, just went _là-bas._ " Joel didn't usually use the Greek term _aphanes_ in French, preferring vague euphemism. "But I checked that envelope that Prawn mentioned, remember?"

"Old neighbour in the holiday spirit?" Paul said sceptically. "What's it say?"

The card was on the kitchen table, the red envelope torn at the edge. Joel handed it to Paul, who read it. "So these people _are_ watching," Paul said slowly. "But we're supposed to believe they're watching the watchers, is that it?"

"Looks that way."

"And who are they?"

"Dunno. British? Based on the writing style," Joel said. Paul's English was completely fluent, but if he couldn't hear the accent out loud he was inclined to miss other cues. "Lots of older anglo types phrase things that way too, but that might explain why they want to talk about Prawn."

"Christ, everyone wants Prawn, he's got the sun shining out of his ass," Paul said, propping the card up on the table. "Or maybe it's nuclear winter. Well, you want to go down the street and see them or not? Should I wear my bulletproof vest?"

"I should have got you one for Christmas. I knew there was some perfect gift idea that wasn't coming to me." Joel had been thinking about it since he came out of the whiteness that morning, wondering if it was safe (or smart) to go investigate. "I keep thinking every time you and I leave the house we'll come back and someone else will be gone. _They are fast. Faster than you can believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and_ don't _blink._ "

"Dork." Paul leaned his chair back, looking up at the kitchen whiteboard to see who was home. "Well, it's not like we're the mightiest protectors of the place. Prawn's here, we can let him know we're going. Arlette's here -- she has a way with people, as she likes to put it. Tell Nour to record everything, if it happens."

"That'll be good. I gotta work on getting everybody some kind of formal nonviolence training," Joel said, finishing his cup and getting up to put it in the dishwasher. "But as usual, with mutants, there's probably nothing specialised enough yet and we'll have to come up with a program ourselves. Professor Xavier must have info he can send me..."

"A lot of the mutant punks in St-Henri would show up for that. It's not that nobody could teach, just that everybody's been doing everything unofficially and under the table for the last five or ten years," Paul said. "People learned from each other, not from seminars. Think of it as getting everyone to pool the experience they've already got, and collate it, and it doesn't seem so daunting."

"Yeah, that's true."

"Anyway, first dibs on the bathroom, if we're going somewhere," said Paul, getting up from the table too. "Might as well skip the Dermacolor -- they damn well know what I look like."

* * *

Paul brought one of Aunt Carmel's fruitcakes along, since it was still wrapped up in cheesecloth and packed in the red tartan tin -- if anyone _else_ was watching, better make it look like they really were visiting a neighbour for New Year's. It actually wouldn't have been such a bad idea to make nice with the neighbours, Joel thought with a touch of guilt. That was down to his shyness and Paul's mild agoraphobia; they didn't model the right kind of behaviour for the younger kids to encourage them to maintain ties with the community.

Joel went to check on Hodya in the basement bedroom before they left. She had made a neat pile of crumpled tissues on the unused side of the bed, and he gathered them up to throw them away for her. She was curled up like a snail on the side of the bed nearest to the snow-filled window, deeply asleep. Joel couldn't bring himself to disturb her, so he just left a note for her on the table.

The house down the street was a limestone duplex just like St. John of God House, although the ground was lower on this side of the street and there was no wall around the ground level. A bay window gave the house a towered, castle-like look, with a wrought-iron fence around the basement window well. A nice old Milton Parc house, totally normal-looking.

Joel glanced at Paul, got a shrug in response, and they went up the flight of steps to the door, where they rang the bell.

The door opened, and a young woman in hijab answered. She was dark-skinned, with a megawatt smile and huge brown eyes, and her scarf was white with a border of little embroidered roses. "You came!" she said with obvious delight. They'd guessed right: she had a British accent. "I thought this was going to be harder. Please come in -- I'm Faiza Hussain, and...well, I already know your names, of course."

Joel and Paul came in when she invited them, taking off their shoes at the door. "Well, we can pretend," Joel said to her, although he didn't offer his hand, since sometimes there were religious issues there for Muslim women. "I'm Joel, this is Paul."

"Thanks for inviting us," Paul said, and if there was not a little irony in his voice, he smiled and offered her the box. " _Bonne année_. Sorry it's a cake full of booze, we didn't know."

"Oh, what, is it fruitcake? My field partner's probably happy to eat it for me, he likes that stuff," Faiza said, bringing them through the front hall to the living room. "But that's so sweet. Sit down anywhere you like and I'll get my partner so we can all talk. D'you want a cuppa, if I make a fresh pot? Lovely. Just a moment, please."

She pounded up the stairs with the thundering gait of a teenager -- she was probably a bit older than Joel, but seemed somehow more youthful, enthusiastic and cheerful and a little bit awkward. She came down the stairs again with an older man and then went off to the kitchen.

The man was in his late fifties or early sixties, with very white hair in a careless fringe over his forehead, but his eyes were dark and penetrating, like the demanding eyes of a Byzantine saint, deepset and shadowed under dark brows. He reminded Joel of the older hippie types he knew who'd aged out of it, barefoot in jeans with an old Triumph Motorcycles t-shirt whose Union Jack logo had almost completely flaked away from many washings. "You're putting the kettle on? You want me to start? Right. --I'm called Will. Dr. Hussain and I are MI13, which is officially the Extraordinary Intelligence Service for the U.K.," he said, sitting down in one of the chairs across from Joel and Paul. 

"Mutant espionage?" Joel said, not even sure he had the energy to be mad about this. At least they were being nice. "Is that what 'Extraordinary Intelligence' is supposed to be?"

"Mutants and, well, whatever else comes up," Will said, as Faiza came in to join them again. "She's a full agent, I'm just a reservist; all registered mutants in the U.K. can be drafted if necessary. I've been on this mission awhile, but the situation's deteriorating so I got HQ to send Faiza in, keep things under control as best we can."

"'Deteriorating' sounds a bit pessimistic," Faiza said, curling up in a basket chair. The decor of the place was anonymously middle-class, comfortable but not personalised. Like a hotel. "But it's definitely heating up. We were originally meant to approach Francis Dudley -- not in a creepy way -- and just see how he felt about maybe coming home to England."

"We were interested in a few British nationals who were known to be in the city," said Will. His voice was a deep London drawl, picking slowly through a sentence and pausing in strange places, with a certain understated confidence that no one was going to interrupt or stop listening. "Not just Dudley. Nobody's going to put a bag over his head and toss him in the boot of a car. We know he turned down an offer from Department H, and he might well turn MI13 down too. Fine. Doesn't hurt to ask, does it? But a number of people above us are getting concerned by how Department H is doing business. So are you."

"We're on your side, we're _so_ on your side," Faiza said earnestly. "I was afraid you wouldn't even talk to us, after the way Department H has been hounding you lot. Bothering you in the hospital is absolutely not on -- well, maybe if there'd been some kind of emergency, but there _wasn't_ , it was just to show you they could."

"We're trying to be a bit less obnoxious," said Will dryly, as Faiza got up to answer the shrilling of the kettle. "You've also got a connection with the company Neurocherche, and MI13's very keen to have some more intel about them."

"Oh my God," Joel muttered, rubbing his temple with the heel of his palm, trying to ward off a nascent headache. 

"Don't look so worried -- we've got biscuits if you want any -- honestly, just try not to worry about the parts that aren't your job, yeah?" said Faiza, setting the teapot down on the trivet on the coffee table, along with a bag of Fox's ginger cookies. "You're not with the government, you're not covert agents, you just do good things for mutants in the city. So keep on doing that. But the thing is...well, we know you've been involved with Neurocherche--"

"Doctor, I don't mean to be rude, but is there anything we can do here _at all_ to keep your completely benevolent agents from watching us every minute of the goddamn day?" said Paul. "Like, if we give you information about Neurocherche, would you say 'thank you kindly' and fuck off back to England, or would you just keep watching our house like you have any sort of right to be in our business all the time?"

Faiza fell silent for a moment and Will answered. "She outranks me but I've been a spook longer, so I'll tell you. The two of you are political. Maybe you think it's just a house, but you also go to protests, you post bail and advocate for mutants who've been arrested, and in the past, you've interfered with police who wanted to arrest a kid by turning it into a tug-of-war with the Church. That means your own country has files on you, and they're watching. That's reality. The way to make them stop watching is to stop taking political action. They'll stop caring as soon as you do. Lead a compliant, obedient life, and the only ones interested in your data will be corporate algorithms trying to guess what you like to buy. Ideally, this all happens in the background and you don't even know."

"Well, there's more to it than that," said Faiza. "Yeah, governments watch activists and minorities. But Department H is new, and so far they're rubbish at covering their tracks. They're also trying -- this is my theory but I think I'm right -- to make sure you _do_ know that they're watching. They want you to feel like the only option is 'if you can't beat 'em, you might as well join 'em.' And that's not what this should be about," she went on, pouring the tea. "It should be voluntary, it should be people who really want to protect their country. Superheroes, not...miserable conscripts."

"But Britain _has_ mutant conscription -- you're the only developed country that does, in fact." Joel accepted the tea and refused the cream and sugar. "If we had that law this whole thing would have been over weeks ago and we'd already be on the chain gang in Ottawa."

"The law's on the books, but it's really just a formality. The Director of MI13 doesn't believe in putting the arm on people to join," Faiza said, passing a cup to Paul after doctoring it for him. "MI13 should be for people who want to be there, people who earn it. The best of the best. Not to sound conceited. I mean, the registration law was passed when there was a real need for all the superpowered help the country could get. I don't love it either, but it's a _de facto_ thing, not like sending every mutant to boot camp as soon as they manifest."

Will just raised an eyebrow as he set the creamer jug back on the table. "Would you two like to hear a story?"

Paul was threaded with sceptical dark green and indigo, flashes of irritable red, indications that he didn't like this but was going to listen. _"Vas-y."_

They were in way, way over their heads, Joel thought. "Yeah, fine."

Will opened a drawer in the end table and got out a locked box with a combination. He thumbed through the wheels and opened it, getting out a thick stack of ID cards that were bound together with a rubber band. He took off the elastic and laid each card out on the coffee table, one by one.

Joel leaned forward to look, but the cards seemed to have nothing much in common. A couple were for mutant registries, but most were driver's licenses or health cards. They came from different countries: Britain, the U.S., Spain, Ireland, Germany, Australia, Turkey, even the U.S.S.R. Different names. Different ages. Different faces. All men and no women, but that was the only commonality. Twenty-two of them. "What are we looking at?"

"Those are all mine."

Paul was frowning. "So you're what, a shapeshifter?"

"Not quite. I can't mimic anyone else. When I trigger a shift, it's a spin of the roulette wheel -- I don't know what I'll look like next. And I can't go back to a previous form. When it's gone, it's gone. And the third incredibly lucky break I got is that when my mutation first manifested, I couldn't control it." Will idly rearranged the order of the cards, perhaps in chronological order; the ones at the left looked more brittle and yellowed from age. "With a power like this, you wind up getting arrested a lot. Usually for trespassing. Break and enter. 'Who are you and who let you in here?' So I came to the attention of police, and then to the government."

Faiza was listening quietly, a gingersnap forgotten in one hand, as if she hadn't heard the story before. Maybe they hadn't, Joel thought; the two of them didn't seem to know each other well yet. 

"Every nation that's rich enough has something like Department H," said Will. "Sometimes a couple of competing agencies. Sometimes a long succession of them. This has been going on since the Second World War, at least. Most likely the oldest ones began in the Thirties. Ours was just called The Department, at the time, and they told me they could fix my mutation. Stabilise it. At this point, I was changing uncontrollably every few days. I was in solitary confinement in Wandsworth because they didn't know how else to keep track of me. I was desperate and I agreed to let them try to fix the problem."

Paul's angrier colours had washed away, and he was a sickly greyish yellow. "What did they do?"

"They sent me to a facility -- that's the right sort of word, isn't it? On an island off the northern coast of Scotland. Here's the twist in the story: they actually didn't cock it up. Eventually they did find a way to stabilise my power. No more involuntary changes, and now I have a sort of base form...I wouldn't call it my real one, because it's definitely not the body I was born with, but it does me fine." Will shrugged. "So I'm probably the best case scenario. But now they've spent money on me and they effectively own me. They can track me -- they made sure of that when they were tinkering. Implant in the skull that persists even when I change."

"An _implant_ \-- why didn't you say something?" Faiza demanded, sitting up in her basket chair. A blue glow appeared around her right fist. "I could take that out--"

" _No_ , thank you, please don't...do your thing," Will said with a vague slicing gesture. "The implant's the same thing controlling my power, I'd rather put up with being on call for MI13."

"Well, you shouldn't have to _choose_ ," Faiza said, but the glow around her hand dissipated. "Sorry," she said to Joel and Paul. "Talking over your heads a bit. I can take people apart and fix them and put them back together, like they're an anatomy model. Living cross-section. It doesn't hurt, but people find it a little unnerving. I'm not a surgeon -- after I manifested I thought, 'have I had it wrong, was I supposed to be into surgery?' But it just never...I'm talking because I'm uncomfortable, sorry."

"It was a long time ago," Will said, sweeping the ID cards back up and stacking them again. "But my point is that these laboratories are everywhere. When the very earliest mutations were showing up, governments all over the world already had plans to use and manipulate them. They've focused on the more difficult mutations. If they cause some disability, if they 'disfigure', in inverted commas. Poorly controlled, too intense, destructive. Anything that causes a problem. Those mutants get recruited first. What the labs learn from working on those mutants, they then apply to the pool of more desirable recruits -- people who could be useful. I fell into both categories; I'm not as good as a proper shapeshifter who can mimic, but I'm quite useful in the human intelligence field. They've asked you before, haven't they?" he said to Joel.

"Yeah. The RCMP asked me about it before Department H did," Joel said. His cup had gone cold so he topped it up from the pot. "So...what, do you think Neurocherche is the Canadian equivalent of the lab in Scotland where you were?"

"Probably not Neurocherche itself. We don't know for sure yet, but it's likely a kind of feeder facility that sends some patients on to the real place. Meanwhile it collects data on the local mutant population, both by taking patients and by using telepaths to keep tabs on everyone else in the area. That's a guess," Will said. "But I think we're on the right track with it."

"At the street-level, some of the staff probably think they're actually helping," said Faiza. "Your Dr. Gervais is duped, I expect. He goes in a few days a week and does office visits, some surgeries, and some of the patients just get sent someplace else for other treatment. He doesn't know, and that makes the operation look more legitimate. Legitimacy brings in more patients."

"That's fantastic," Joel said, slumping forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "I don't suppose you could recommend a good epileptologist then?"

"Don't know any in Canada, sorry." Faiza got up from the chair and came around to sit on the arm of the sofa. "Don't get too discouraged, guys. Better to know now before you sign the wrong form and get stuck in a worse situation, right? Department H is still new, and -- all right, Will's got his experience, but I refuse to accept that every country is just always going to have an inhumane program to experiment on mutants. I _won't._ Because if that's true then there's no point in even trying to shut them down."

"There's always going to be bugs in my garden but I can still try to get rid of the standing water so the mosquitoes don't breed," said Will. "There's an ecology to this stuff."

"What do you want from us, anyway?" Paul said. "Can we get off this amusement park ride if we just give you the data we got from Neurocherche?"

Faiza's eyes widened and her smile came back at that. "Did you get something? We didn't know how much you had--"

"Yeah, we went to Neurocherche last night to look," Joel said, too tired to hold back. Maybe that was their plan. Did it matter? "Just to look. My friend downloaded about 30 gigs of data from their systems, which we haven't looked at yet. I was able to talk to one of the patients. We took a few pictures, but visually the place doesn't look that bad, so it's not all that enticing for the press. If we found some good stuff on the USB drive, we were hoping we could leak it and make a big noise in public about the place."

"That's not a bad plan, but the goal is kind of diffuse," said Will. "The danger is that if you shine a light on Neurocherche, they might go to ground and you'd lose them. You want to get the patients out first, right?"

"Right, but the patients were actively helping us. Someone there has the ability to temporarily insert other people's memories in your head -- she was able to give Paul the information to find the computer room, and give the password to my other friend who was helping. The security guards wear some kind of disruptor that makes them immune to telepaths," Joel said. "The patient I was talking to said she just needs someone to get close and remove the disruptors. After that, the patients could get out by themselves."

"We'd _really_ like to see whatever's on that flash drive," said Faiza, keeping her arms folded to look like she was still serious, even though she was bouncing slightly on the arm of the sofa. "This is -- that could be really great, I don't want to get too excited yet. Would you be willing to let us look? Have we convinced you we're all right yet?"

"I have no idea who to trust anymore," Joel said, sitting back on the sofa and looking at Paul. "What do you think?"

Paul gave him a familiar expression, the one that said _seems legit, if that even helps us at this point._ He was obviously tired, a dulled look to his skin, but whatever he smelled in the air seemed to have convinced him. "I'm not a lawyer, what do I know?"

* * *

Aurora fell asleep in the car. When she woke up they were stopped at a light, Langkowski muttering into his headset phone.

"Yeah, we're just out of Gatineau now. I dunno, half an hour or so, maybe? Traffic's all fucked with an accident on Dalhousie. I know I should've taken the 417, I just thought this would -- I _know._ But it's been a long ride, I was thinking she should get something at Timmy's before we head in. Or do you want to...? You do. Fine. Twenty minutes, then. Later."

Aurora pushed her hair back from her face, rubbing at a print left in her cheek by the edge of the seatbelt. She peered through the window at the city. Dark. Snow was swirling through the headlight beams, and in the red and blue flashers of a couple of cop cars. A sporty little VW was crushed in the middle of the street, like a pop can, its occupants either dead or long gone. She saw no one, only a dark head inside one of the cruisers.

Langkowski glanced up at her in the rearview mirror. "Awake?"

"Uh-huh."

"We're in Ottawa. Well, obviously. Almost home."

"I've never been here before," she said.

"Not much to see, really. Not this time of year. God, I hate winter."

She craned her neck as they drove past the Parliament buildings, the green roofs caked in snow. As usual, she didn't know quite what to think of them. They were handsome but stern, foreboding. Like churches. All up-and-down, square angles and sharp spearpoint ornaments, bells and steeples. She didn't know if anybody loved these buildings in particular, really, if anyone could love them the way Americans seemed able to love their symbols. But it reminded her of pictures of London, a bit of romance.

_Almost home._

Jeanne-Marie had been taking out the garbage early on New Year's Eve when she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man at the gate, ducking under the low doorway in the stone wall. His blond hair was uncovered in the cold, cheeks and ears pink. She didn't recognise him, but he held up a wine bottle and smiled at her.

"Can I help you?" she had asked, a bit nervous. He was too old to be one of Prawn's friends.

"Peace offering," he had said in English, "for New Year's. Is McCree in?"

She shook her head dumbly.

"What about Paul Laliberté?" He pronounced it in the extreme English way, Lalliberty.

"They're both out." She realised, too late, that it might have been a mistake to say that. Although what protection were they, either of them?

"Oh. Too bad. Tough to make a good apology when the masters of the house aren't home. You know when they'll be back?"

"No." She caught herself. _Don't tell lies._ "Sometime tonight. I just don't know exactly when. They -- they could be back any moment. Are you, I mean, do you want to talk to someone in charge?"

"Well, we can talk, right? Why don't you let me in and we'll discuss the whole thing. If McCree gets back before I have to leave, I'll do my obsequies for him. Otherwise you can pass on the message. Once I explain myself."

Jeanne-Marie didn't like to get between two men who were fighting, _blessed are the peacemakers or not._ Being a go-between was a thankless job. Aurora always liked to be in the thick of things, though. "You should really talk to, um, probably to Arlette Truffaut instead. I'll get her for you."

"No, I -- wait." He smiled and rubbed his eyes. "I'm going about this all wrong. I owe all of you an explanation. Department H does, I mean, but I'm here to give you the message. The Director reamed me out good for the way I went about recruiting you, believe me, and they really want to make sure you know what's what. Can I please come in? This wine's not supposed to be chilled."

Jeanne-Marie hadn't known anything about Langkowski or Department H, but now she was clued in: she'd missed something, and Aurora was to blame. Blindsided again. She pursed her lips, turned around and climbed the icy steps up to the door, the big man tailing her. She went through the kitchen to the east side of the house, where the formal sitting room was empty, as usual. The man set the bottle down on the coffee table and wandered over to the picture window, on which the Catholic Worker logo and the name _Maison St-Jean-de-Dieu_ were stencilled in white.

"Is Dudley here?"

"I can get him."

"Please."

She went across to the back common room on the west side and knocked on the doorframe. Prawn, sprawled on the big sectional couch with two other kids, looked up from the TV. The tableau held for a moment, the beer bottles on the end table and the grey drift of newspapers on the floor—nobody had done chores in here today -- Requin and another kid lounging around with plastic cups of Pepsi and rum, Christopher Lloyd on the television with his time machine.

And as easily as that, her brain seemed to swerve as if across an icy road, and Aurora rose to the surface. "Hey, Shrimp Cocktail, there's someone here to see you."

Amid catcalls, Prawn stood up unsteadily, swaying his hips. "I am just in fucking _demand_ tonight, lads."

"It's a man, sorry, but don't let that get in your way," said Aurora. 

Prawn made an exaggerated face of disappointment and imitated a slide whistle. "But this is still a ploy to get me alone, right?"

"Of course it is," she said, patting his arm as she led him out. He did have bad teeth, but he had the English trick of smiling so that few of them were visible. He was cute, on the whole. Aurora liked him, even if he did look (and smell) like a wild pony -- she always had a soft spot for tall boys, the leggy and awkward ones. He would be enthusiastic in bed, she judged, if a bit too fast.

Prawn sloped along with her to the sitting room, but when he saw who their guest was, he stopped and seemed to sober up a bit. "What do you want?"

"To talk."

"It's fucking New Year's, mate."

"Perfect time for starting again, isn't it?" Langkowski smiled. "I wanted to make things right between us for the new year."

"Right, well, sorry I didn't ring up and let you know or anything, but I'm out."

"Out."

"Out, you know. I'm not going to work for you."

Langkowski sat down. Not smiling now. "Why not?"

"Christ, you don't want to get into this. Because an insane pacifist paid me off, that's why not." Prawn picked up the bottle of wine. "Oh shit, it's that pink stuff. Pass."

"I assume you don't know any other insane pacifists besides McCree."

"None who have money, no."

"How much did he offer you?"

"Yeah, you're not going to get into a bidding war over this," said Prawn. "I'm a lazy, unreliable bastard and you're better off without me on your payroll."

Langkowski sighed and rested his forehead in his hands, then continued to droop forward until his head was between his knees, like he was feeling faint. "This is not good. Not. Good. Dudley, have you any idea what you're doing? You ever heard that thing about 'for want of a nail, the shoe was lost'? We need you."

"There's a whole passel of mutants in the other room. I'm sure one of them wants a job. Joel can't bribe them all."

"None of them can do what you do."

Prawn tipped his head back slightly and gazed down the length of his long nose at him, saying nothing.

"I realise that it could have been seen as threatening," Langkowski said, looking across at Aurora. It sounded like a prepared speech. "The way I approached the two of you, I mean. I'm sorry about that. The government of Canada does not threaten, does not blackmail. I used Dudley's S3 status to get your attention. It was a misuse of my authority as an RCMP official. I apologise."

"Did you need to scare my brother into going too?" Aurora asked.

Langkowski hesitated, staring at her as if he suspected something. "No," he said at last. "No, Jean-Paul was very interested in participating. I think he had some reservations about federalism and working for Ottawa, but he wanted to do something practical with his powers, something to help. But he wasn't living in an anarchist commune -- no one was trying to buy him off or pressure him into staying."

"So now it's us who were pressuring people?" said Prawn.

"It's you who were pressured. McCree is -- he's manipulative. We already knew that, from his file. He comes off like a space cadet, so I assumed he doesn't know what he's doing. But he does. There's a history on record." Langkowski sighed. "Anyway, that doesn't matter now. I'm asking you again, Dudley: help us. You have an incredible power and a chance to use it to protect other people. Don't let somebody else tell you what's right and wrong."

Prawn looked for a moment like he would cave in; he stood gazing down at the carpet, not moving outwardly but clearly experiencing some inward turbulence, visible only as the slow movement of his chest. "No," he said finally.

"Just no?"

"Just no."

"So you drank the Kool-Aid after all?" Aurora said to Prawn. "Do you even have a reason of your own to be against this?"

"Yeah, my reason is I don't trust them. And fuck this guy, Joel's right about one thing. My powers are more than dangerous. I've already hurt people with them. You think I really want to see somebody else go down with a face full of radiation burns?"

"We wouldn't ask you to--" Langkowski said, but Prawn interrupted.

"You would. Or maybe it would happen by accident. I don't know what's worse. And that's all I'm going to say. This argument's boring my tits off."

Langkowski lifted up his hands and let them drop. "All right. Okay. I tried."

That had been that, more or less. Prawn wished Langkowski a happy New Year, sounding almost sincere. And he left. Aurora said, "You promised us someplace to stay?"

Langkowski looked like he was about to go home and drink his career problems away, but he brightened a little when Aurora addressed him. "Absolutely, still on the table."

"What if I came back to Ottawa with you tonight?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Did something happen here?"

"I'm not comfortable," she told him, because it was none of his business. And she wasn't comfortable. Nobody was, lately. Joel and Paul were a sealed-off unit, and even though there was a lot of talk about how the house was run by consensus and nobody was in charge, in practice there was obviously some unspoken hierarchy. Some people felt neglected or unappreciated, others felt like they weren't allowed to help with anything without stirring up drama and power games. Joel's girlfriend wasn't even a mutant, and although she was nice, there were some weird rumours going around. Aurora was bored and Jeanne-Marie was repelled.

And she wanted to have a brother.

She had a few blurry infant memories of Jean-Paul, or really only one: she was sitting on the floor, on a blanket, with Jean-Paul beside her. They were playing with (or tormenting, more likely) a placid, elderly white cat who allowed them to grasp handfuls of its fur in their tiny fists. That was it, and she was afraid to even recall that memory too often, worried that she would wear away the details and replace them with accidental fictions. She couldn't even remember Jean-Paul's face clearly, just a quiet feeling of being _we_.

She'd missed that feeling all the rest of her life. She knew it wouldn't be simple to get it back, but it had to be _possible._ He wanted it too. She knew he did.

So while the others dozed and fought in front of the TV, Aurora had packed her few things in grocery bags and put them in the trunk of Langkowski's car. It was only a couple of hours from Montreal to Ottawa, even with the traffic accident. Ottawa was grim and grey so far, but she didn't regret leaving Montreal: she didn't feel like an intruder or an imposition anymore. She was valuable.

Their destination was a tall, white building in a bland government neighbourhood, one with a lot of city planters and traffic islands. The building had sloped sides, and was dotted with many small, dark windows; it looked rather like a ship, poised as it was in an empty parking lot sea that swirled with white snow against the orange-dark sky. Langkowski slowed at the gate only long enough for the lot attendant to wave him through.

"Put your hat on, it's cold," he said as he got out.

They left dark footprints on the grey carpet as they walked through the halls. In the elevator, she asked, "Is Jean-Paul here?"

Langkowski sighed. "Not yet. Next week, or the week after. We're hoping. Things are very up in the air right now. I think Clarke was talking about pulling the plug on Friday, but now we've got you two, and Bridget and Niko. Kyle might still get back in the game. We've got Heather, me, and Hudson on staff. That's a good start. But I was really hoping Dudley would be on board."

"Wait, Kyle?" said Aurora, remembering. _I gotta stay in my boss's good graces, I'm lucky to be there._ Common name, but still. "Blond, long hair, teeth and claws?"

"Uhhhm." Langkowski scratched the back of his neck. "I guess you ran into him at some point? Small world. Well, in mutant circles I guess it is. Yeah, Kyle's on medical leave right now. We helped him with his mutation and for awhile he was doing great, but since then he's had a few problems. That's the short version, I don't want to violate his privacy."

"Is he okay?"

"He's totally okay." The elevator doors opened on a very bland institutional hallway, the air cool but stale. "We gotta fill in a lot of forms for security here, sorry..."

* * *

Kathleen Morley opened her eyes in the morning and didn't move, trying to remember the night's conversation with the ghost beside her bed. She wouldn't have imagined someone so ordinary. The people she saw were usually strange-looking, beautiful, or so plain that their features slipped away from memory. But the almost-invisible boy had been ordinary, and specific. She remembered freckles, and the angle of his nose. More to the point, he'd been wearing a coat. Indoors. A black wool coat, missing a button, the right tab of his shirt collar peeking over the lapel. Too much detail to be fake.

She was coiled in her bed with extra pillows cushioning her aching joints, between her knees and under her ankles. She was cold all the time, but she wore layers to bed not just for extra warmth, but so that if anyone came in the night to _process her_ they would have to unwrap her first -- she would wake up during it, know what was happening. 

So this time they came in the morning before breakfast and put the needle in her neck. They flooded her veins with silver, and it kept her from lying to them. Did she know anything about some missing files? No. Had anything strange happened last night? Yes. What?

"A guy was here," she said. Like being really drunk, her tongue slow, brain barely aware that she was talking.

"You saw him?"

"Yes."

"What did he look like?"

"Thin. Freckles."

"What colour hair?"

"Too dark to tell."

"Was there something strange about his skin? Did it seem to glow?"

"No."

"You didn't see a girl?"

"No."

The two questioners looked at each other. They wore white, but they weren't doctors or nurses. Kathleen didn't pay attention to their faces; different people came in all the time to question her and her roommates. Ling was watching her from across the room, waiting to get the needle herself. Ling saw everything, all there was to see for miles around. Kathleen wondered why they bothered asking anyone else.

One of the women in white sighed. "Tell us more about the guy you saw. How old, do you think?"

"Young. Early twenties." It was hard to talk, hard to think. Her face felt numb.

"What was he doing?"

"He just...he just appeared. Standing there."

The man shook his head. "She was hallucinating. The cameras didn't show anything. We're wasting our time."

"They got in range. We don't know anything about their powers. It could be a telepathic illusion, astral projection. Or any number of things," said the other woman. "Did he say anything to you, Kathleen?"

"Yes."

"What did he say?" The man clicked his pen.

The woman pointed officiously at the file. "Specific questions only, remember."

"Will you just let me work? What did he say, Kathleen? Start from the beginning."

"Don't remember."

"The first thing you do remember."

"He said he was real." More was coming back to her. Like a hard exam question. "He wanted to know about us. What you do here. What you do to us. I told him, I told him everything. His name is Richard McBrien. He said he'd come back for us."

"Anything else?"

The woman checked her timer. "She'll be lucid in less than a minute, Mike. Directed information gathering, okay?"

"I think he was like a health inspector," Kathleen said. She felt dizzy. "He was interested in that stuff."

"But he was a mutant."

She blinked -- she could feel her chin again, the nerves in the tip of her nose. The back of her neck burned. "He was, yeah. If he was real."

The Neurocherche people packed up and moved across the aisle to Ling's bed, bent her forward and injected her. They didn't even do it privately, which was the worst thing -- no, she had to stop calling things _the worst._ You had to leave yourself someplace to go. It was hard to watch them question Ling, but they all would have known about it anyway: there wasn't much privacy on a ward full of telepaths.

Kathleen lay back on the pillow, which hissed slightly with a sound of escaping air. She took the yellow earplugs from their plastic box on the bedside table and blocked out the sound of the questions, although she could still feel a numbness where Ling usually was. Knowledge shaken loose like muffins from a pan. Ling was always high up in the layers of minds that surrounded Neurocherche, always quiet, like a gull sitting on a rooftop. She watched everything. Debriefing Ling always took a long, long time. Repeated injections.

The interrogators had no opinions about the information they gathered, of course -- they were technicians and nothing more. But Kathleen wondered if anyone would bother to tell her the answer: had she been hallucinating or not? She didn't know herself anymore.

* * *

Joel and Hodya went back to the airport the same way they'd come, by metro and shuttle bus. Both of them knew that it wasn't going to be a good idea to put Paul in the middle of this, or (for that matter) anyone else from the house who had a driver's license. "I'm sorry we didn't have...well, basically any fun," Joel said as they rode the shuttle from the Gare Centrale. "I wanted to at least fit dinner in, but everything went pretty pear-shaped."

"Well, I'll come see you another time and we'll do strictly fun things," Hodya said. "What about the Biodome, is that fun?"

"Yeah, kinda. We went there on a class trip in high school. They have lynx...es? Is that the plural? And penguins. I liked it when I was a kid, anyway," Joel said. "I always liked museums."

Hodya smiled out the window. "Me too. You remember when we were -- it was the second time we met, when I was still living in Ottawa. At my dad's house, that garden party, and I was staying inside being a sulky teenager about something. But you must have been having a good day because you talked to me a little, and I showed you my microscope."

"I was on loads of drugs that day, that's why I came off sort of normal."

"I wouldn't go that far," Hodya said, but she nudged his foot with hers. "Most of my friends didn't put up with my science stuff, they weren't interested. But you let me take a sample of your cheek cells from inside your mouth, and I put them on a slide. We looked at yours and mine, and you said mine were nicer, which was the dumbest compliment I'd ever heard, I loved it. Nice cheek cells."

"That was sincere," Joel said. "Your slide did look better, mine seemed kind of squashed and weird."

"I may have done a better job prepping the slide, but there's nothing wrong with your cells. I kept the slide for a few days because I liked that, having that kind of image of somebody I knew. A kind of picture of them that nobody else would take. Also I was wondering if maybe your cells would disappear when you did, but the answer was no, which is boring. You're right, though," she added. "It was a completely sincere compliment, because you always liked to admire me. I really liked that. It's not...that kind of thing isn't enough for a relationship, but being admired is still nice, at the right distance. I didn't think I was pretty, at that age."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I felt like 'interesting' was the best I had. 'Pretty' was for blonde Gentile girls or something."

"You weren't even an awkward teenager, though, you were gorgeous."

"No, I was _really_ awkward."

"Okay, fine, what would I know about awkwardness? Obviously I'm not an expert on the subject..." Joel let her have the point. "I always -- this sounds bad, but I just...loved to look at you. I didn't want it to be this gross one-sided pedestal kind of thing, but yeah, I liked to admire you."

"It was a little bit pedestal," Hodya said, looking back up at him. "But only in person, somehow. On the phone you'd just talk to me like a human being, so it worked. We didn't quite work in person. It already feels better, doesn't it? More like being friends."

"I think so. I hope so."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've written Faiza as a mutant, rather than her origin story in the Captain Britain comics (mysteriously zapped by an alien war machine) just for sanity's sake. Will's power is sort of inspired by Alastair Stuart's poorly described/drawn curse of "mutable appearance"; I basically just wrote what I thought a curse of mutable appearance should be like. (The characters have nothing to do with each other otherwise.)


	9. Half a Heart

_Because we want the peace with half a heart_  
_and half a life and will, the war, of course,_  
_continues, because the waging of war, by its_  
_nature, is total — but the waging of peace,_  
_by our own cowardice, is partial._  
—Daniel Berrigan, S.J.

Jean-Paul had only been at Department H for a few weeks, but he already had opinions.

The uniforms: ridiculous. He and Aurora were given Kevlar-lined training suits, something like what speed skaters wore, and they left little to the imagination. These immediately tore into pieces when the twins trained at high speeds, leaving them half-naked when they landed. Fun time was had by all. The Department had promised to find a better design that would stand up to the physics, and until that happened the twins were grounded. 

The name: not exactly inspiring. For now, they were being called Alpha Flight. There was also a Beta Flight and a Gamma Flight, Hudson said, apparently equivalent to the farm team and the junior league. Jean-Paul never saw any of these other team-members, and for all he knew they weren't even gathered up anywhere. He hadn't chosen his own codename, Northstar, which felt like twee Can-Con bullshit. But it was just a name.

Their fearless leader: not a mutant, apparently. Jim Hudson was some ex-engineer for a military tech company, and he had exactly zero superpowers but was working on a suit, like a cut-rate Canadian Iron Man. Jean-Paul wasn't impressed; the guy seemed fine, really, and probably better than the rest of them in terms of organising and strategy, but it seemed strange that after all this talk of "mutants policing mutants" the team leader was a baseline.

Other fearless leader: Heather McNeil was Hudson's second-in-command, they were probably sleeping together, and she wasn't a mutant either. But she had police experience, at least, which was more than the others could say. 

Langkowski: hadn't been briefed that "frog" was a derogatory slur.

That didn't mean Jean-Paul wasn't enjoying himself, of course. He liked being in on the ground floor of things, so to speak, ahead of the teeming masses. The team was in rough shape, but that meant he'd get to witness it coming into its own. The ones who couldn't keep up would be replaced by the ones who could. It was exciting (as well as frustrating) that nothing was settled yet. Maybe they'd even be part of history.

Their needs were all taken care of. They ate in the big bright cafeteria, which had enormously high ceilings and a view over the bare-branched city, the Parliament buildings and the river. At night they slept in small hostel-like rooms. (The Coordinator promised them better quarters later, when the rest of their funding came in.) They left the building for training exercises at Algonquin and a couple of military bases, but other than that they were kept mostly within the complex's many walls.

Not that it felt confining -- Aurora went out shopping at the Rideau Centre one day, bringing Jean-Paul with her to critique outfits, and Jean-Paul himself went out to the library when he had cabin fever and needed to get away from the Department. It was the schedule that was exhausting.

Hudson approached Jean-Paul one day at lunch. "Eating alone?"

"The others are still at Algonquin," Jean-Paul said, picking the onions out of the bulgur pilaf that was on the menu for the day.

"You were careful flying back, right?"

"Careful not to go too fast and split my pants? Of course."

"Good. I just wanted to have a talk with someone on the team who has a flair for discretion, you know? I think that's you. Langkowski spoke pretty highly of you."

Jean-Paul didn't think he'd seen Langkowski enough to merit that sort of compliment. Maybe this was supposed to be an attempt at smoothing things over after the "frogs" remark. "We can talk."

"I'll be telling the others most of this stuff, but I just wanted to bounce the ideas off one of you guys first. We're coming up on our first mission soon. I'm not quite sure when."

Jean-Paul kept eating and gestured for Hudson to go on. He wasn't about to get too excited, since there had been rumours about the first mission for awhile now.

"It's not the mission I actually wanted to do first," Hudson said, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from Jean-Paul. "I wasn't actually supposed to be leading Alpha Flight, you know. Originally we had another recruit who was going to be in charge -- he _was_ a mutant. I know we seem a little off-message, with me and Heather organising things. I really do think it'll be better for Alpha Flight to be a mutant team. But our anointed leader flew the coop, and he did it in a pretty messy way. We'd like to go after him and get him back into custody. That's my choice for our first priority, anyhow, but the Director wants to be sure we can handle it first. I mean, so do I. But that means we'll be doing a few smaller runs to get our feet under us."

Jean-Paul cracked open his bottle of water. "So this guy you're after would've been the team leader, but instead he's coming back as a prisoner? Because of the way he left?"

"That's about the size of it."

"What'd he do, go postal on everybody?"

"There were a lot of injuries and fatalities, yes."

Jean-Paul hadn't been expecting a serious answer to the question, and it made a ripple of doubt run through his mind. "It might be awhile before we're ready for that."

"Well, I believe in the team. Anyway, this job won't be nearly as hard. In fact, I want to emphasise that we'll be there to de-escalate any conflict," said Hudson. "I don't even want us to be there at all, but it looks like it might end up being necessary. It all depends on him."

"Him?"

Hudson pushed a file folder across the table to Jean-Paul. He folded his arms and sat back, looking genuinely discomfited. He was a big guy, who looked more like a farmer than an engineer, which he apparently was. He had one of those square English faces that Jean-Paul found hard to read.

Jean-Paul flipped the folder open, scanned through a page or two of government legalese about confidentiality and security, and found himself looking at copies of personal records, apparently taken from the CRIM database.

`Name: LALIBERTÉ, PAUL LOUIS-JOSEPH. `  
`D.O.B.: 02/08/92`  
`Citizenship: Canadian`  
`Status: Mutant (Patent. Class ± 1.8)`  
`Manifestation (inc. date if known): 24/05/06. Longueuil, PQ. (See file NO21987-1b, Schedule I for details)`  
`Mutation: Bioluminescence, empathic abilities (read-only, chemically based).`  
`Risk Assessment: Low. Possesses no offensive, defensive, or evasive capabilities.`

`Name: McCREE, JOEL KEVIN.`  
`D.O.B.: 28/12/92`  
`Citizenship: Canadian`  
`Status: Mutant (Patent. Class ± 3)`  
`Manifestation (inc. date if known): 15/11/07. Ottawa, ON. (See file NO56904-3c, Schedule II for details)`  
`Mutation: Invisibility concurrent with intangibility.`  
`Risk Assessment: Medium. Evasive capabilities only. `

Jean-Paul looked up, raising a brow quizzically. "We're going after the Catholic Worker guys?"

"We're not 'going after them.' I have orders from higher up to make sure he doesn't do any serious damage to Neurocherche." Hudson folded his arms on the table. "I don't like it, and I want you to know that. We've dealt with Neurocherche before -- Walter and I were working on a project with AmCan before this, in liaison with the feds. I saw what Neurocherche does. If McCree wants to go in there and spring some patients loose, we'll look the other way. If he damages some records, these things happen. But if he destroys any of their research, we'll have to stop him. Him and his crew."

Jean-Paul was not listening very carefully; he was looking at the passport-bland photos and wondering who was looking at his own file. He heard phrases like _higher-ups_ often and real names very rarely.

"You understand me? I wanted to come to you first with this, because you and your sister have had some dealings with him. He's a good guy, really. But I can't let him wreck all the progress Neurocherche has made. Then it will all have been for nothing."

"So," said Jean-Paul, trying to wrangle his thoughts into something coherent, "what are we going to do?"

"Watch and wait. If and when he makes his move, we'll be there. He plays nice, we get to go home early. He doesn't, we take them into custody. You got me?"

"I got you."

"Good." And Hudson shut the folder and put it back in his briefcase. "I'm glad we talked."

* * *

"Cry me a river," Aurora said, when she and Jean-Paul were talking in his room later. "They go around acting like they think they're some combination of Jason Bourne and Jean de Brébeuf, then they're going to get arrested. Not like it'll be the first time, anyway."

"I'm not saying they shouldn't get arrested if they're breaking into places and messing with things," said Jean-Paul. "Just that it's creepy for the Department to have that much information about what they're doing. What they haven't even _done_ yet."

"I'm just glad to be out of that place. Bunch of religious nuts telling me what to think, it's just like Madame DuPont's," Aurora said, rolling over to lie on her stomach on his bed. "And the downstairs toilet was always broken because those walk-in kids never flushed, and who was always on bathroom chore duty? Me, four days out of seven."

Jean-Paul was sitting on the floor with the TV remote, flipping aimlessly through Netflix. "Yeah, well, it's not the right kind of place for you. But here's the other thing, Hudson said he wasn't originally going to be the team leader. They had some mutant tapped for it."

"Are you supposed to be telling me this?"

"We're never going to develop a secret twin language if we don't bond, c'mon. You want to watch this? It's Audiard." 

"Mm -- oh, Vincent Cassel, yeah. He's ugly-hot, I love it," Aurora said. "So what, are they going to replace Hudson midstream too when they get a mutant leader they like?"

"Maybe. But Hudson said the guy they'd planned to have running the team just like, killed everyone and ran away. Or something, he was all vague about it. But he said people definitely died."

"Yeah, sounds like a great leader. A+, would get stabbed by again." Aurora moved onto her back again, letting her head hang upside down over the edge of the bed, her hair pooling on the floor. "I don't mind having Hudson in charge. Means we can always overpower him if one of us gets him naked. Wink wink."

"Ugh, you take him. Not my type." Jean-Paul put the remote aside. "So Hudson wants us to go after Captain Stabby, once we're ready."

"Whoa, what?" Aurora sat up.

"Like arrest him."

"At this rate, the team will be ready to take on somebody like that at around a quarter to never."

"That was what I was thinking," said Jean-Paul dryly. "See, twin-bond already."

* * *

Faiza and Will came over to the house the next day, bearing a reciprocal gift: a heavy two-kilo bag of rice, not exactly elegant but extremely welcome. "Your Facebook page said you guys could use some food donations," Faiza said as she set it down on the kitchen island with a heavy thump.

"Wow, thanks," Joel said, surprised and touched. "Who's even updating that page now? It used to be Niko's job and then we forgot about it."

" _We_ didn't forget anything," Grace said from the kitchen table, where breakfast was still on. "I took over for her on the English side, Mars does the French posts."

"Oh man, really? I'm sorry." Embarrassing, and par for the course lately. Joel didn't know how to promote anything via social media (pamphlets were as far as his advertising savvy went) and had assumed that the Facebook page was dead and denuded of readers. "Thanks, Grace."

"Well, speaking of technology, we came by to look at the USB drive," Will said. "We won't take it away from you but we want to copy the data and read through a bit of it to see what's there."

"Is it safe to talk about any of that stuff here?" said Paul, who was putting the morning's second round of dishes in the dishwasher. "We don't know how they're monitoring us, do we?" He straightened up and raised his voice above the breakfast chatter. "Do we, Prawn?"

"What?"

"Is it safe to do anything private over the Wifi, is the house bugged, any useful info like that?"

Prawn was eating a second breakfast just because he could, but he sighed and brought his half-finished bowl of porridge to the kitchen island. "Are you precious naive dimwits telling me you don't already encrypt your internet shit?"

"No, but we also don't talk about our conspiracy adventures online either," said Paul. "It's all updates about rice and Joel emailing in his theology papers late."

"Okay, well, keep that up. And yeah, I've scanned the whole property more than once. Nothing here is transmitting radio on any frequency -- nothing that isn't supposed to, anyway. I can jam all the signals if you want, but it's overkill." Prawn spooned up the last of the oatmeal and pushed the empty bowl in Paul's direction. "I'm betting it's either telepaths or someone across the street who watches the car come and go and phones it in."

"You're Francis Dudley, aren't you?" said Faiza.

"He does have that pleasure," Joel said. "Prawn, this is Dr. Faiza Hussain -- she and Will here wanted to talk to you about the usual thing. I don't know when's convenient for that. You guys can use the front room to spread out in while you check the USB drive," he said to Will, since he wasn't quite trusting enough to set a pair of foreign spies loose in the house office with the door closed. _What the fuck is my life right now?_ "Paul, if we clear off the kitchen table are we good to take a look at maybe planning a run on Neurocherche?"

Paul closed the dishwasher and sighed. "Do we have any ideas yet about how to transport thirty-some kids from Repentigny to wherever we're putting them?"

"We're in the brainstorming stage on that."

"This is what we're dealing with," Paul said rhetorically to Faiza. "Yeah, we might as well. Waiting won't make it any better."

"D'you mind if I sit in?" said Faiza. "We might be able to help out, indirectly."

So they cleared off the far half of the table, while a few stragglers kept eating at the other end. Joel knew that it was possible that some of their own kids were reporting back to Department H; it would have been both easy and cheap for the government to do it that way. But he had to draw a line somewhere when it came to caution, and he'd been telling the truth when he told Heather McNeil that he would have made a terrible covert agent. The kids at the house were his guests. They were eating and sleeping under his roof, and that was the point of this entire exercise -- that they could stay here without suspicion, without being scrutinised, without having to meet a set of requirements. Like any other guests in any other civilian's home. He would rather be taken advantage of than abandon that ideal.

"Are we overthinking this?" said Joel after they'd been staring at Google Maps for awhile. "Can we not just rent a couple of vans, or some boring solution like that?"

"They take your information at a car rental place, Prince Siddhartha," Paul said, getting up to make a fresh pot of tea. "I know you've never had to rent a car, but they ask for your credit card and a photo ID."

"Well, so? There are telepaths there who can alter memories, so if we don't get caught red-handed we probably won't get caught at all. I'm not sure a paper trail is going to make a difference either way," said Joel.

"All right, we're brainstorming, we're not judging," said Faiza, writing it down. "I reckon Will could find a way around the ID problem -- he's good at faking up paperwork and talking his way past. But that's still a lot of people to move at once with anything short of a school-bus."

"Yeah, and I have no idea how to work this," Joel said. "This is like that annoying riddle about the fox and the goat and the boat or whatever. What do we do about telepath surveillance, _if_ that's even happening? They can't be paying attention to our every thought, since we got to Neurocherche and back last time without getting caught."

Mars, who was sitting in, shook her head. "A psionic spy might not _be_ a conventional telepath. Maybe a remote viewer, maybe some other specialised talent."

"Okay, well, can we screen against that?" asked Paul, sitting down again at the table beside Joel. "Couldn't you shield us?"

"Shields don't work like on Star Trek, okay?" said Mars. "I can't shield unless I know what I'm trying to cover."

"Cover everything, what's hard about that?"

Mars tipped her head back, rolling her eyes, as if the idea were so vastly stupid that she didn't know where to start. "It's hard to cover other people without crowding into their heads. And non-telepaths putting up shields is pretty much a joke. A few people can do it, if they've been taught properly, but that takes a long time. Shielding from a remote viewer is next to impossible, unless someone has a super long-range talent for jamming other mutants' abilities."

"Let's focus on what we _can_ do," said Faiza. "You guys got into Neurocherche once, like you said. _Insha'allah_ , the telepaths will help when they're able. If nobody has errands to run today -- or even if you do -- why don't you bring someone along to watch and actually see if cars follow or not? Get a few more data points on that topic."

"Yeah, that's a good idea," Paul said. "I dunno. Mars, if you and Ox want to go to Bulk Barn or someplace we have a list on the fridge."

"Only if Ox comes, I hate lifting boxes," said Mars, but she got up from the table. "I can scan while he drives and see if anyone's following."

"And where are we going to put everybody?" said Paul. "They're not homeless kids, and they're not even all minors -- we don't even know who is and who isn't, unless the USB stick has patient information on everyone. Parents are gonna want to know where their kids are."

"Then the kids with no family issues can go straight home, that's the easy part," said Joel. "I don't want to get arrested for kidnapping here. The Professor might be able to take some, and we could put some of them up here, if that's even _safe_ , but we don't have infinite resources. We don't even know if all the patients there unanimously want to leave, we don't know _anything_. What happens to them when they're off their meds, whatever's being given out there? They have real health problems, and I can't even find a doctor for myself--"

"Hey," Faiza said, pushing her chair back and standing up. "Let's take a break, we're getting stressed out. Joel, want to come take a walk with me round to the corner shop? Buy some sugar and get our heads together?"

"Am I being handled? Sorry, yeah," Joel said, tired and annoyed with himself that he couldn't calmly work through a problem like this. "We don't have to go anywhere, I'll go take a literal chill pill."

"No, c'mon, get a little air. It's good for you," said Faiza, already going to the front hall to put her boots on. "You're not being 'handled', or not in a bad way. Sounds like you were implying a bad way. There's nothing wrong with trying to give people some space to deal with things."

"All right, yeah," said Joel, and he went with her to get his coat. "As you can see, this place runs like a Swiss watch," he said wryly when they got out the door and into the cold, clear January air. "All thanks to me and my organisational prowess."

"You're running a homeless shelter _and_ trying to plan a superhero operation," Faiza pointed out. "I don't think anyone expects that to go terribly smoothly."

"We're not superheroes."

"People with superpowers trying to save other people who are in trouble, hm, yeah. Wonder why I would've chosen a word like that," said Faiza, putting her hood up carefully over her hijab and sticking a spare pin in the lapel of her coat. "Ow, that wind is _bitter_ , it's stinging my face--"

"That's why I said we didn't have to go anywhere, yeah. Sorry."

"No, it's fine, I'm acclimating. I mean London's cold, but this is different. What's your secret, how do you guys manage?"

"Gore-Tex and mentally dissociating from the body," Joel said with a smile as they crunched over the sidewalk towards Sherbrooke. "But yeah, I'm not really a fan of the concept of superheroes."

She looked up at him, her mittened hands stuffed in her coat pockets. "Why not?"

"I think it kinda puts this glamorous gloss over something we'd hate like poison if it were packaged any other way. Unelected, unaccountable people -- sometimes not even _identified_ \-- deciding by themselves to interfere in violent situations. Deciding who the bad guys are. Using force however they want. The only way it works is if you assume that superheroes never make mistakes."

Faiza gave him a slightly pained _why do you hate fun_ look, but she said, "So what is it you think people like about the packaging? The glamorous gloss?"

"I don't know. The superpowers themselves, probably. Maybe that adds a sense of wonder, maybe it makes it seem miraculous, like some higher being acting instead of just another human acting like a vigilante." It was more bitter than Joel usually got, but this was shaping up to be a bad day for the inside of his head. Frustration at everything was building up. "Maybe it makes baselines feel like mutants have a right to exist if we use our mutations for some purpose that meets with their approval."

"Were you angry when the X-Men didn't save your dad?" Faiza said quietly.

"It's not about Dad."

"I'm not asking if your dad's the grand reason behind everything you think. I'm just asking if it made you angry."

Joel didn't answer right away, not sure he wanted to, but as they waited at the light, he said, "I'm not mad at the X-Men. I'm mad at the Prime Minister, because he was _asking_ those questions, about who was responsible if something went wrong. He knew what could happen. But then he just signed off on it anyway because it helped him to have an outside force to scapegoat. I'm not mad that superheroes make mistakes -- everyone does. I just hate it that we're acting like the best solution to violence is to introduce a whole new type of it, with even fewer safeguards on it. And we just have to trust the powerful people, or else we have to look for even more power and use it to fight _them._ This isn't any kind of way to run a human society. And I find it hard to argue against baseline bigots who hate mutants because they don't trust people who have that much unchecked power. The only way out of this that I can see is for people to stop getting so goddamn excited about power and violence. To start believing in a way to cut it out entirely. And no one wants to do that."

The light turned green, and Faiza hurried across the street with Joel. The lights in Montreal were always a little too short for pedestrians to get all the way across. "Your idea involves a lot of trust too," she observed. "Probably more. Look, I'm a doctor, you know? I could hurt people with my power if I wanted to, but I _don't_. I wouldn't. We don't do the traditional Hippocratic Oath anymore, but at my school we still had a little ceremony with the Declaration of Geneva. _I solemnly pledge to consecrate my life to the service of humanity,_ good stuff like that. And I have a bit of privilege, because I can use my power for that. Not everyone can. And I believe there really is something noble about mutants trying to be heroes. It doesn't have to involve, I don't know, throwing punches in mid-air. You could think of it as Good Samaritans instead of vigilantes."

"I don't have a problem with people who are helping without hurting anyone -- that's what we're trying to do, right?" Joel pushed open the door of the Couche-Tard and held it for Faiza. "But what about a case where, I dunno, Mutant Joe stops an attack on Civilian Jack by blasting a hole in the perpetrator's face? No warning, no trial, no inquiry, just somebody dead or injured. Did the right person get hurt? Who knows? If it happens in a movie, you cheer because nothing bad actually happened and you like the idea of bad people getting what they deserve. But what do you do with that in reality? You just hope that someone else is strong enough to give Mutant Joe what _he_ deserves. That's unacceptable in this country, it's unacceptable in any country."

"Have you ever used your power to do something you shouldn't?" Faiza asked, walking by the freezer section to look at the ice cream. "No judgement, just wondering."

"Yeah, I have. I try not to, but I've done it."

"But not every day, right? You do try, and when you mess up you feel guilty. You repent, you go to Confession -- right?"

"Yeah. If it's a priest in the box who doesn't know me well, I just tell him I invaded someone's privacy and leave it at that," Joel said. "It hasn't happened that often."

"Well, and you work with a lot of mutants. Do you think you're that unusual? Do you think other mutants don't try as hard to use their abilities properly? I'm not trying to be rude, I'm just saying..." Faiza turned to look at the chips, bending over to look at a lower row. "I think most people are basically all right, you know? Think about all the people you've met in your life, and how many were total unredeemable bastards. Not that many were completely hopeless, right? Less than five?"

"I grew up knowing a lot of politicians, so more than five."

"Yeah, yeah. Mister Cynical, the charity worker. I believe that completely. I just think violence is always going to happen, and encouraging heroism is going to make things better, not worse. But it has to really be heroism. Like you say, we can't just give the label to anybody running around in a costume blasting holes in things. We need discretion, just like with everything else. You have some flavours of crisps we don't, this is cool. What does 'all dressed' taste like?"

"It's hard to explain," Joel said. "Kind of ketchup and vinegar, I guess?"

"I'll try them for cultural exchange, sure." She picked up a bag. "You want anything?"

"I dunno, let me look." He went up the aisle to look at the candy. Paul liked the Twizzlers that were filled with some sugary icing-type material, even though they gave him indigestion, and since he never had any regrets after buying them Joel sometimes picked them up to make him happy. "Am I coming off as a total nihilist today or something? I believe in heroism as a concept -- that's what sainthood is. Someone who lives a life of heroic virtue."

"It's not like there haven't been violent saints," Faiza said, taking a Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar as well. "She said, carefully not bringing up the Crusades."

"Well yeah, or even Joan of Arc. But there've been lots of saints who left the military, too. Beat their swords into ploughshares. It's a big tent, but this is my corner of it," Joel said. He took a bag of Starbursts and went to the cash with Faiza. When they were paid up and on their way out again, he said, "I believe in nonviolence because it does seem unnatural. Because it's surprising and hard. It demands a lot of imagination and a lot of work. And it may not be the worst thing in the world to have some violence in life here or there, where it's needed, but at this point in history we're addicted to it. It's like telling an alcoholic they can only drink after five o'clock. It's not going to result in less drinking. They'll just start planning their life around the time when it is allowed. We're too obsessed with violence as a culture."

"Maybe," Faiza said as they walked back to the lights. "You're not coming off like a nihilist, but you sound like you need a break. More than a walk to the corner shop, that is. You sound like some angry celebrity who's been attacked for a week on Twitter and now you've snapped and you're yelling at Barbara Walters."

"Oh my God." Joel laughed, hard enough that the cold air was sharp in his lungs. "That is a wakeup call, holy shit. I'm sorry, that's the last thing I want to sound like."

"You appreciate honesty, I figured. No, c'mon, it's not that bad, I just know what the warning signs of burnout are. Being under surveillance will do that to you, and so will feeling helpless when all you want to do is help people. Health care field, we know all about it." 

"I'm not burned out, but I'm getting disappointed in myself," Joel said. Faiza was a good listener, the kind of person he'd always wanted to be himself, and had never managed to be, too reticent to take the initiative and draw people out. "The house is stressed out, and a lot of the ideas I had at first never panned out. Stuff about communal living and equality. I'd just read a lot of books, you know? I read theories. I didn't really understand how to deal with people, and I still don't."

"You're not dying of cancer or anything, mate," Faiza said as they crossed the street. "It's not too late. We'll get this Neurocherche thing sorted, and you lot can go back to doing what you were supposed to be doing. Promise."

"I hope so. Yeah."

* * *

The house was quieter when they got back, Mars and Ox gone on their Bulk Barn mission, Will still in the front room hunched over a laptop, the other kids tucked away in their usual places now that second breakfast was over. Prawn had gone off somewhere too, possibly with Mars and Ox. Faiza went to join Will in the front room to find out what news there was. Joel sat down with Paul at the table again.

"Better now?" said Paul.

"Yeah. Here, I got you those things you like that give you stomach cramps," Joel said, giving him the package of Twizzlers.

"The key to my heart. God, these are so gross, I love them," Paul said, opening the package. "I don't suppose any ideas came to you in a beam of heavenly light while you were out?"

"There's only so much the Couche-Tard can do," Joel said, tilting his chair back and suppressing a yawn. "Christ, I wish I could just go back to bed. It's pretty ironic that a bunch of people with supernatural powers can't get thirty teenagers out of a lab in the suburbs."

"No kidding, eh?" Paul peeled off one of the Twizzlers but didn't eat it, just twisting it absently into a spiral. "I guess we just don't have the _right_ superpowers, at least for this job. This would be way too easy if you could make other people intangible besides yourself," he added, a little hopefully.

"Nope."

"Have you ever tried?"

"Not really. Not extensively, anyway," said Joel. "But they asked when they were testing me for my CRIM card. Dr. Xavier asked about it. Way back at the Civic in Ottawa they asked, when I first manifested."

"Maybe you should try extensively."

Joel shook his head. "No. It's -- I can't even imagine how that would work. Like jumping over your own knees."

"People's powers can develop over time, you know that. Things might be possible now that weren't five years ago. Try it with me."

"No."

"Joel." Paul pushed the candy aside on the table. "If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Can we just try?"

Joel looked like he was thinking about it, and then after a moment he reached out for Paul's shoulder...and then frowned and took his hand instead. Bare skin to bare skin. A shimmer of coral-gold ran over Paul's wrist, with rivulets of violet and blue. His guts felt tight. He was terrified, suddenly, frightened that he was pushing too hard in a vulnerable place, that his only friendship was going to come apart like rice paper.

Nothing happened for a few moments, although Joel faded out and back in again. 

"Not working?" said Paul.

"Hold on." Joel closed his eyes and disappeared again -- this time Paul's watch went with him. Paul caught a strange, ticklish sensation of something moving _through_ the bones and tendons of his wrist, not exactly pleasant. When Joel reappeared, the watch fell with a clunk onto the table.

"Holy shit, you did it--" 

"No, that's old news. There's sort of a field that affects little things. My clothes disappear with me too, after all. But a person's a lot bigger than a watch. Let me try again." This time he faded out, not touching Paul. He was gone for several seconds -- a long time, it felt like -- and abruptly Paul felt something touch his face.

Then nothing.

Worse and bigger than nothing. Cold emptiness and a pale snowy blank that hurt the eyes. Eyes that were no eyes. He was dead. No flesh and no smells and no colours and no sounds. Certainly nothing so luxurious as a taste, not even the dank salt of his own mouth. He was dead. He was alone, unplugged from the rest of the universe, and there was nothing he could do to undo this. There was no doorway back in, no way back to the world of light and colour and sound and solid matter. He had been undone and unmade. Nothing left but this single point of consciousness that would not wink out, unwelcome as a ringing in the ear.

No one was with him. No one else existed. Like deep space, but white and without stars, without even the background hiss from the Big Bang that radio telescopes could hear. The emptiness was hungry for being, but it only destroyed. A cold so dry and bitter that if you could throw a cup of water into it, it would sublimate to vapour with a gasp. No thought, no language. All the tongues were whittled down to splinters here. Arctic ice-fog, the kind that ate ships, swallowed whole expeditions. Planes tracing circles and grids would never find him.

And then he _fell_ \-- not only out of the awful blankness but also off his chair onto the hard ceramic tiles. Someone was on top of him, his face was in someone's armpit. He couldn't remember who he was, or even what city he was in. The press of noise and details was coming too fast.

Someone was talking to him. "...you okay? I had to grab you fast or I didn't think it would work."

"It _won't_ work!" Paul exploded. "Don't do that to another human being ever again."

Joel was righting the chair and sitting back down at the table, concerned but not falling the fuck apart the way Paul was. "Was it really bad? I couldn't tell -- it was just like every other time for me. I didn't even notice you."

"I didn't notice myself either. That felt like hours -- sensory deprivation messes people up, okay?" Paul was shaking, getting up and sitting down again, keeping his hands flat on the table to feel the wood, reminding himself that he was still here. "We can't use that to get anyone out of Neurocherche. Okay? You can't do that to someone else."

"Sorry." Joel refrained from an _I told you so_ , even though it was probably warranted. "But at least in an emergency, maybe--"

"Ask me," Paul interrupted. "Don't decide it for yourself, if it comes down to that. You're -- you must be used to how it feels. Immune. I don't know. But other people...I could lose myself in there. Promise me."

"I'm not sure I could even do it with someone I didn't know well," Joel said. "Getting in isn't that bad, but getting out...it's hard to explain. It's like taking apart a toaster and putting it back together. You can learn to do that. But then try taking apart a toaster, taking apart an alarm clock, mixing the parts up in a pile together, and trying to rebuild both things. I know you. I can -- I can find you down there and put you back together. With someone else, things might get lost."

Paul took a second to interpret that. "So, what, we were -- mixed together in there?"

"No. Sort of. I don't think anything really exists, there in the whiteness. Not even thoughts, really. Sometimes...sometimes when I'm just waking up after a seizure, I have a moment where I don't remember who I am or what I am, nothing. There's just this sort of core, a little pilot light. And then gradually I remember everything else and I get it back, all the rest of the layers. But I think the only thing that can exist in the whiteness is that pilot light," he said slowly. "And I know yours."

Paul's skin was a riot of colour, the stubborn sunset reds still skimming along over the shuddering turquoise yellows of his shock. Those pretty hibiscus reds, which Joel and everybody else could interpret perfectly well. Everybody knew, everyone who spent any time with the two of them always figured it out. Even Joel knew, Paul thought. He'd been fooling himself for so long, thinking that what went unsaid must also be unknown. At least unconfirmed. But it was all in glorious, obvious Technicolor on Paul's part, and Joel too was blushing.

Joel looked down at the table-top. He seemed to be thinking the same thing, and he said, "I don't want to have another awkward conversation today. But we'll talk about it."

"Talk."

"Yeah. Nothing else we can do." He looked up at Paul. "You know that about me."

It pissed Paul off. He could easily understand how Hodya must have been feeling all this time, how frustrated by Joel's refusals to explain, or by his explanations that still didn't reveal anything important. Paul could smell desire, such a basic thing, like salt, and he was tired of pretending it wasn't there. He wanted an acknowledgement of reality.

And he always had. What was surprising was that he'd waited so long.

He leaned across and kissed Joel, hard, teeth bumping against lips and a fine scrape of stubble. That was the only thing he remembered about the kiss, later -- that and the feeling of Joel's breath across Paul's cheek as they broke apart. The rest of it all dissolved into blank space, the shock of doing it for real instead of just thinking about it.

They did break apart, but Joel's hand stayed on Paul's chest, just below the collar of his shirt, undecided about whether to push or to pull.

"You liked it," Paul said, hating the way he sounded, but it was true. He knew it was.

"That doesn't matter."

"It matters."

"How? How does it matter?" Joel sounded like he wanted to be upset but couldn't find the energy. "How does me liking it make it a good idea?"

"But you liked it."

Joel looked down and took his hand away, folding and then unfolding his arms, but he said, "Yeah, I mean...yeah."

"Good," said Paul, letting out a breath. His diaphragm shuddered, as though he was near tears or laughter. "You should do stuff that you like more often."

"I do. I like all of this, Paul. I like making giant pots of oatmeal in the mornings, I like bailing Prawn out of safety, I like getting up in the night to give someone a bed. I like you. I like _you._ " Joel struggled for a moment to say something else, the words stuck in his throat. "This makes me happy. Even if sometimes it seems like all I do is complain, it makes me happy. That's what I really feel. Are you happy?"

Paul wasn't unhappy, he thought. St-Jean-de-Dieu made him feel like he mattered, after an adolescence of being variously a freak, a patient, an inmate, and a burden. The house was just a house, infuriating and peaceful according to the day, but more than that, it was the manifestation of something he loved most about his best friend. Paul believed in the mission, but he wouldn't have taken these risks for anybody else. He wasn't unhappy. But a cat watching a fishbowl might not describe itself as happy, and neither would Paul. He was waiting for something.

But Joel was watching him, and then deliberately, he shoved his chair closer to Paul's. Joel leaned in and kissed him, and it wasn't as hurried or heart-in-mouth as the first one. Just a test drive, seeing how it all fit. Paul could still smell the salt of desire, but also something peach-warm with the effervescence that happened when fear and exhilaration came at once, nose-tickling. The sunset warmth of it smelled like the gold and scarlet that were flowing across his own skin.

He had just buried his hand in Joel's hair when he heard, behind him, a shuffling step and a sharp intake of breath. Someone blurted out, "Oh my God!"

"I was going to come in and say 'Eureka,'" said Prawn, "but I guess this is actually more exciting than my thing. Carry on."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Couche-Tard is a chain of convenience stores (dépanneurs, remember?) which is known in the rest of Canada as Mac's. (For awhile in my childhood they were called Wink's, because of the logo of a winking owl.) I know the name sounds like a weird insult in English.


	10. Let the Watchman Count on Daybreak

_Come, Holy Spirit,_  
_bending or not bending the grasses,_  
_appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame,_  
_at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow_  
_covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada._  
_I am only a man: I need visible signs._  
_I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction._  
_Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church_  
_lifts its hand, only once, just once, for me._  
_But I understand that signs must be human,_  
_therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,_  
_not me — after all I have some decency —_  
_and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you._  
—Czeslaw Milosz, tr. Robert Pinsky

The kitchen suddenly seemed very noisy. Joel heard his chair scrape over the tiles as he leapt up, but it all seemed far away, like images through the wrong end of a telescope. A fire in his head, from the blood rushing to his face, and that felt distant too. There must have been less than a second between Prawn's words and his response, but Joel had time to notice that some part of his mind was repeatedly and automatically trying to remove himself from the Aphanes -- it was irritating, like hearing someone bang a phone receiver back into the cradle again and again. Slamming himself back into physicality even though he hadn't left. Each time it set his teeth on edge, but it didn't take away the numbness. He could only listen to himself stutter.

"Wait, wait, just -- wait, wait..."

Whatever his brain was trying to convey with that, it gave up; he lost control of his power entirely, collapsing under the pressure of the air like a candle flame going out. He couldn't remember ever feeling so discombobulated, not since his father had died.

It left Paul behind, but Joel couldn't get himself back -- he materialised in the laundry room in the basement. Regressing, really. This used to happen when he was a teenager, waking back to the world in some completely different place from where he'd been when he disappeared. He didn't know what force it was that dragged him back after being out, as much as he'd tried to explain it to Paul, but it wasn't always under his control. Left to itself, it operated with only a rough predictability and sometimes with a bad aim. He didn't know how much time he'd lost, if any. Minutes? Hours? Tiny square tiles, the white metal machine churning and vibrating, the grit of spilled detergent crystals under his cheek. He pushed himself to sit upright. 

No, this had definitely been more than a few minutes. He could tell from the feeling in his brain, strange, much like a seizure's aftermath minus the aching muscles and headache. Sounds were too loud, textures were too textured, and the seams and joints between moments, thoughts and events seemed weirdly obvious. He couldn't afford this right now. 

He held onto the laundry table for balance as he stood up, and walked unsteadily to the stairs. Where he stopped suddenly and sat down on the bottom step, and began to cry. Hard, hopeless crying, like a child, sucking back all the sounds so that no one could hear, and he didn't know what it was for. He was thinking of his father, grief in his stomach, a heavy weight of it like dough that wouldn't rise, and he couldn't think why it would bother him now, now out of all the times for the last five years that he'd been without his father.

_No, you know why. You know why. It's because there's no one to get you out of this now. There's no one to help you._

It was silly. His father might have helped with the Neurocherche issue, but neither of his parents could get him out of the hole he was in with his personal relationships. Joel was an adult. He had to fix this by himself.

_This is all I have and I'm losing it._

Hodya was gone, and she'd been right to go. Paul would leave for the same reason, because you could only expect people to have sexless relationships for a limited time. A few years, at best. Then they'd leave. The only sensible solution had been for Joel to take this sexless life of his and elevate it to some good use, to find an Order where he wouldn't be the only one who was like this, where other people had impossible ideas too and cared too much about all the wrong things. But even that wasn't going to work, because in religious life you had to be a functioning fucking human being, and he still wasn't. After years of therapy and work, endless work, working on himself, constantly working and trying to be different, he was still the same.

He wiped his face on his sleeve and sank back into invisibility. It was late afternoon now, he could see as he moved through the house, through the walls with their pink fibreglass innards and metal-ribbed cables. This felt more and more like his natural state lately. Snow and static in the picture. Will and Faiza were gone. Paul had gone somewhere too, of course. _Please come back. Please come back._

Joel drifted through the wall and passed over the deep snow in the backyard, through the fence and across the pine-dotted lawn to Saint Sulpice. He didn't bother to walk in the door, just faded back to physicality in the side chapel in front of the Blessed Sacrament. He was still overflowing with tears. Usually this happened after seizures, but occasionally it came over him a few hours before one, so that was something else fun to look forward to. Or maybe he was just this messed up. He knelt there with his arms folded over the edge of the pew, alone in the church, the monstrance a blur of gold and white above him, the sanctuary lamp a red star burning in its glass. 

He didn't even know if he was allowed to be here. The church opened in the afternoons for Confession, but if there weren't any takers the priest often locked up again. _Idiot, the monstrance is out, that means someone else is around._

And in fact, he heard footsteps approach behind him and pause at the end of the pew. "Need to talk?"

A priest, but no one Joel knew. That happened sometimes; visiting clergy would pop up for seminars, retreats, or special masses. 

"Um..." Joel tried to get a clear breath, wiping his face again. "I don't know. Yeah, I guess. Unless you're busy."

"I'm busy doing this." The priest was old, skinny and bald with a few hairs left sticking up vertically at the back of his head, big ears, a mouth too wide for his face and eyes completely hidden by pouches, smile-lines, and other wrinkles. "You're English? Good, I don't know any French. Visiting from Chicago. If you'd been French I'd just have to sit here and cry with you. You want the box?" he asked, hooking a thumb over his shoulder at the confessional. "Face to face? Your dime."

"Here's fine, yeah," Joel said, pulling his sleeve over his hand to wipe his face one more time, trying to steer out of the squall enough to be able to talk. "I don't know if I can make a good confession, I haven't made an examination of conscience so I don't know if I'd remember everything."

"Listen to this, the guy's a pro. Well, we can just talk -- doesn't have to be a sacrament. Even though we're right in front of the Boss," the priest said with a smile, sitting down in the pew in front of Joel, turned to the side so they could see each other. "What's up?"

"Everything. Everything is up. Sorry, we haven't met," Joel said. "I live across the way, my name's Joel."

"I'm Leo. You want to start at the beginning? Or you could start at the end and work backwards, up to you. I like beginnings, myself, but you can't always remember them."

"Yeah." Joel got off the kneeler, sitting down and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. "Um, okay. Look, I have a neurological condition, and sometimes I just cry for nothing."

"Sure. I had a stroke two years ago," said Father Leo, lowering his head slightly to point at a faint scar on his skull. "Shakes things up. Things get to you in a way they didn't before. But I don't know as I'd say people ever cry for nothing." He paused. "An old woman told me once -- she was old when I was a kid -- she said tears come from the Holy Spirit. If humans were in charge of our own design, we'd never cry at all, she said. We wouldn't put that feature in. We always want to look strong. Dignified. But God gave us tears. God pushes us to tears. What do you think about that?"

"I think I'd like Him to stop pushing."

Father Leo laughed. "Good luck. What's He been doing with you? You look like God's been pushing you around a lot lately."

Joel ran a hand over his hair, which was too rumpled for showing up in public. "I don't know where to start this -- I'm a mutant, I own the Catholic Worker house around the corner. And up until December I was doing a theology degree at the Dominican Pastoral Institute here."

"You could stop right there and I wouldn't blame you for crying," said Father Leo. "What happened to put that in the past tense?"

"The vocations director said I wasn't right for it," Joel said. "And it was true, and I was exhausted. I didn't have the energy for school and the house both. And I was getting sicker. Epilepsy."

"Ah."

"So I left -- I don't even know if I'll finish the degree. Maybe sometime." Joel decided the mess with the government and Neurocherche wasn't the most important thing on his mind, spiritually, so he went on with his miserable love life instead. "I was seeing a girl, sort of. Long distance. I hadn't even really told her that I was serious about a vocation."

"Was that because you more serious about the girl, or the vocation, or both?" asked Father Leo. "Or neither?"

"I thought I was serious about everything. I was just...she's not an idiot, she knew. She broke it off a couple of days ago, but it wasn't much of a surprise to anyone." Joel looked down at the floorboards under the kneeler, shadowed in the dimness of the church. "She kinda thinks I'm gay. And I might be."

"You think so?"

"I kissed my best friend today. I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, Father," Joel said, throat tightening again, and he kicked the kneeler. "I don't know what God wants."

"God wants you to find Him. And you did," said Father Leo. "You came to His house and you plunked yourself right down in front of Him. Good instincts. I know that's not the question you're really asking, but good instincts will take you far."

"I'm too twisted up to love anyone like that," Joel said, barely listening. "I can't be with a girl, and I can't be with a guy unless I leave the Church, and I _can't_ , and I can't even be lonely in a constructive way because I'm not stable enough to be accepted anywhere. So my friend, my partner, he's not going to stay. He'll find someone who he can actually be with."

"You can see the future, huh? How are you with baseball scores?" The old man shifted his weight on the wooden pew. "First of all, may Thomas Aquinas strike me down, but the Dominicans aren't the only order out there, and you are very, very, very young. You've got a long life ahead of you, God willing, and it's a big world. There's room for you."

"I didn't even have the right reasons to join the Dominicans, though," said Joel. "It was all about me. It was trying to run away from all the rest of my problems."

"That's a smart thing to realise. Good you got it out of the way at this age. What are you, nineteen?"

"I'm twenty-three."

"Oh, excuse me. Pardon me, ancient one, I didn't realise I was talking to the mummy of Ramesses the Great. I'm seventy-five. C'mon, you've settled a big question -- that's a good thing, not a bad thing. You know yourself well enough to understand that religious life, for _you_ , right now, would be a cop-out."

"I didn't know myself that well, though. I had to be told."

"Well, even better!" said Father Leo. "That means you had the humility to accept someone else's criticism, when it was on target. Good job. Shake my hand, kid. Put 'er there." He reached across the top of the pew for Joel's hand. "So we can look at the real problem instead. You don't want to be alone. You love your friend and you don't want to lose him. And God help you, you even love the Church. You don't want to lose her either. Right?"

"Yeah," Joel said, folding his arms on the top of the pew and resting his chin there. "And look, I know the counselling trick of telling the person they don't know the future and anything could happen, but it's _realistic_ to say that a normal person isn't going to stay around forever in a situation with no hope of a romantic relationship."

"Isn't that what your plan is?" Father Leo said. "Why wouldn't your friend be just as nuts as you are? You're Catholic Workers, you guys are out there biting the heads off chickens compared with the rest of the world."

"He's not, though, he's here because he loves me."

"Loves you so much that you think it's inevitable that he'll leave?"

Joel raised his shoulders slightly, not taking the bait. "When a door's locked, eventually people stop knocking."

"Okay. I'll let you have that one." Father Leo sighed. "I could let you in on a little secret here -- lots of priests sit in the confessional every day and hear people confessing to all these sexual sins and we think...is this really the biggest thing keeping us separated from God right now? How many times a guy masturbated in a week? Do people feel liberated in spirit when they confess to this stuff? You know what sexual sins are, they're easy to _count_ , so they lend themselves well to this sort of traffic-cop pastoring. Twice a day, seven days a week, Father. Where do your people come from, what part of the world?"

"Irish."

"Thought so. Mine too. My mother died when she was pregnant. She was having twins, which would have made nine of us, and she got a blood clot in her brain. She went to bed one afternoon with a headache, sent us kids over to Granny's to play so that she could get some rest, and a few hours later her sister came home and found her stone dead. The Pill would have saved my mother, and a lot of other women in my family too, going way back. Your family's probably the same way...maybe there are secrets no one told you, maybe it's out in the open. There's a lot of sadness in Irish-Catholic families about this. Lot of women who died young. Or they just died exhausted and broken." Father Leo turned to look up at the monstrance on the altar. "So people come and confess, like robots, that they had sex with a condom on or whatever. Or they don't confess it at all. My job is to act like that's a moral problem that deserves my attention. It's not easy. Why are we doing this? Why are we choosing to be hypocrites when we want to be merciful?"

"I know what you're saying," Joel said wearily. "But I don't want to just...do whatever and pretend there's no problem with it. I don't want to half-ass my spiritual life on purpose. I do that enough by accident already. And it doesn't matter if I just privately decide that I know what I'm doing and that God must agree with me, because you're not my regular confessor, and every week I'll still have to hear the hardliners preach about how..." He trailed off, not even wanting to summarise.

"Plenty of priests won't budge on the sexual sins, sure. I said that a lot of priests will quietly agree with you, but you're right, so what? How much is that worth? Can I really tell a guy like you that you should be getting accused with a shout and encouraged with a whisper?" Father Leo looked back at Joel. "This is something you have to ask yourself too. Maybe it's easy to kick yourself around and think God could never forgive you, but how do you feel about saying that to your friends? Could you say that to your friend who you love? That his love is disordered? Or would your conscience stop you?"

"I've never told him that," Joel whispered. "And I never will."

Father Leo nodded. "Aha. Well, left and right, cafeteria Catholics and Opus Dei, everyone agrees on this part: if there's a piece of doctrine that you can't stand behind -- you couldn't shout it from the rooftops, you couldn't whisper it to a friend, you couldn't live for it, you couldn't die for it -- then you need to let God teach you. Open yourself, turn yourself up to heaven like a big satellite dish, and listen."

"I'm trying."

"I know. And the right-wing crowd thinks that if you really try, inevitably you'll start to agree with them. But it's only an honest effort if you accept the possibility that your mind could be changed either way. 'All I want is the truth,' as St. John of Liverpool said. Just let me tell you one thing, okay?" Father Leo put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't make loneliness your first choice. Don't assume it's the best you can do. Maybe, even without sex, you can learn how to build a friendship that's just as rich and rewarding as a marriage. Maybe anything. You've got more options than you think. But don't choose to be alone because you're scared of the alternatives."

"I don't, I don't want to be alone," Joel muttered, rubbing his sleeve across his eyes again, feeling depleted and exhausted. "Took me long enough, but I don't want that anymore. God...sorry, I should get home," he said, pushing back to sit up and get to his feet. "Thanks, Father."

He smiled. " _De nada._ My next rosary, I'll keep you and your friend in mind. You gonna pray for me too? I'm up to my neck in special intentions."

"Yeah, sure," Joel said, smiling back, and disappeared.

* * *

When he came back to the house, Paul was back in the kitchen, looking blotchy and unhappy -- worried blue and angry indigo, the mealy brown-edged white of a wormy apple, the crashing vermillion of urgent pain. He was reading a book at the table and very obviously waiting, trying to look casual. Joel knew that tactic well himself, how awful it always felt. He materialised in the kitchen and sat down at the table.

"I know it doesn't really help," he said to begin, "but I didn't leave you there alone on purpose. I lost control and only got back about half an hour ago."

"Great," Paul said, snapping the book shut. "Then I guess I didn't get humiliated at all. Stupid me, thinking I did."

"I know it was probably a circus, and I'm really sorry. What can I do for damage control?"

Paul sighed. "Look, it was shitty because I had no idea what to tell them. 'Are you two together', 'why didn't you say so', 'I knew it,' all that. The fact that you weren't there made it look like it was some dirty little secret, and not even _my_ secret. It was yours. That felt degrading. You left me swinging in the breeze, and I know you didn't mean to, but I'm not that convinced it would have been better with you there."

Joel took a few moments to digest that, and then said, "I would have stood up for you. I might not know all the answers to the questions they were asking, but I would have been on your side."

"Maybe. But they all know I'm the one who wants it," Paul said calmly. "It's an undignified position to be in. The one who gets to say yes or no always looks like less of a sucker."

"You're not a sucker."

"I don't plan to be. And I wasn't going to say anything about it while you and Hodya were together, but now I'd just like to stop pretending. Like this is a sitcom."

"Okay. I think that's a good idea too." Joel picked at the edge of the placemat. "You're not the only one with feelings here, Paul."

"Yeah, I _know_ ," he snapped. "That's the issue. I know what your feelings are. That's not some mystery to me! I can taste them in the back of my throat. What I've wanted, all this time, was just to hear you say it. Like you're not ashamed of it. I don't need people to tell me their feelings as some kind of, of -- giving me information that I don't already have. I've always known how you feel. That's what kept me on the line, even when maybe I should have given it up and just made an online dating profile. I knew that it wasn't just me, that you weren't ready but that we had something. But I want you to _say it_ so that I know you're invested. Okay? So that I know it's real to you."

"All right, fine. I love you," Joel said, the words feeling strangely shaped and foreign as they came out of his mouth. Something he had never said out loud, in English, to Paul, with this meaning. "I liked kissing you. I always...I kind of liked it when people assumed we were a couple, because it felt like -- like there was an imaginary version of us and they were happier than we are. It would kill me if you left, and I'd be a selfish asshole if you got together with someone else, I'd be jealous. Okay?"

Paul smiled, finally. Just a small one. "Really? I would've put money on you doing a whole martyred _so long as he's happy_ routine."

"No, I'd hate it. I'd be really passive-aggressive about it, too. What's more attractive than that, right? I'm such a catch." Joel got up to get a can of pop out of the box by the fridge; he kind of liked it at room-temperature, which bothered some kids in the house almost as much as Paul's usual diet. "That's kind of...that's one of the things that convinces me, you know? If we really were just friends and I wasn't attracted to you, I might be kind of picky about who you dated but I'd be happy when you found someone good. That's what the mythical straight guys are like, right?"

"So I'm told," said Paul. "Get me one too -- out of the _fridge_ , freak. Listen, I'm not saying we should start anything right now. It's soon after Hodya, it's soon after your thing with the Dominicans. Timing is terrible. I'm sorry that I forced this issue by kissing you without asking, while we're on that."

"I'm not mad about it."

"But you could be and you'd have a right to it. Everything's up in the air, but I just..." He hesitated, taking the can of Coke when it was offered. "I did it because I just wanted to get real for a second."

"Well, mission accomplished." Joel sat back down with him. He didn't think he could face the Neurocherche problem without the stability of Paul -- who never thought of himself as stable, but now that he was on the right meds he really was. Still full of the old anxieties, but Paul had a strange bravery when the chips were down, deep reserves of strength, and Joel hated the thought of being disconnected from that. "Can we just...keep things the same? The same room, everything else?"

"Yeah. It won't be that awkward, and honestly, not to make you feel like an invalid..."

Joel did feel safer with Paul close by, whether a seizure happened in the bathroom or in his sleep, but he didn't like to detail those reasons out loud. There was so much he owed that he couldn't repay, and even though he knew it wasn't about owing, he still felt like he could never catch up. _One day you'll use it all up_ , his brain whispered to him sometimes. _One day you'll run out of people who still have the energy to deal with you, whether it's because you're sick or because you're just a load to have around._ "I'd just kinda miss having you there."

"Me too."

"Listen, why don't we table it, so that you don't just feel like I'm dragging my feet indefinitely?" Joel said. "Easter's early this year, we'll talk about it then."

Paul laughed. "You're so spontaneous. And so romantic, using the liturgical calendar to schedule relationship talk."

"I thought it was a little romantic. It's Easter. Springtime, rebirth, liberation. If we feel spontaneous before that, we can go ahead and...do whatever," Joel said with a vague gesture, awkward. "I'm just saying the end of March is a hard limit and I won't try to weasel out of it. I've actually learned things from being with Hodya, believe it or not."

"You actually have. We can all hope that this government bullshit is resolved by then," said Paul. "So we'll be free to make our own lives complicated by ourselves."

* * *

On the topic of Neurocherche, Joel remembered that Prawn had come in the door saying _Eureka_ , so he went and found Prawn in the living room upstairs, flipping idly through the Netflix menu. "Hey."

"Hey, um...sorry," Prawn said, looking guilty. "I guess you heard I made kind of a big deal out of everything."

"I didn't have to ask, but yeah."

"So are you two...it's none of my business, right?"

 _None of your business_ was as good as a confirmation, but Joel didn't care by now. "It's really not. I just wanted to know what had you so excited in the first place that you barrelled in the door like Archimedes. You left with Mars to go find Ox, so what did you come back for?"

"Oh. Em..." Prawn visibly had to try to remember. "We were on our way up to St-Viateur, where Ox usually hangs out, because he wanted to check up on a friend of his. We got to talking about Mile End, I forget why. But it made me remember the tower on top of the safety centre. Mars says it disrupts telepathy. I know that tower uses microwaves, so if Neurocherche is using something similar to keep its patients in line..."

"You can jam it?"

"I can do whatever you want to it. I don't really believe microwaves can stop telepaths, like, but you mentioned some sort of wearable psionic disruptors before -- however they work, they must have some computer circuitry, right? Bloody hell, I could fry every computer circuit in the building that isn't behind a Faraday cage. Electromagnetic pulse."

Joel had never done very well at physics, not even when Professor Xavier taught it. "You could do that? You've done that sort of thing before?"

"Well...scale is a bit of a problem," Prawn hedged. "I'd probably do too much damage rather than too little. But Neurocherche is off in the hills, isn't it? It's not as though I'd miss and knock out a hospital's equipment. Or an airport's."

"It's not in 'the hills', but it's a little bit off in the sticks, yeah." It was plausible, though. Knocking out the surveillance and the guards' means of communicating with each other, the chances of getting swarmed by armed security became very low. It was definitely faster and safer than Joel trying to grab the disruptors off each individual guard. "And like, you actually want in on this?"

"If I'm allowed. I know it'll fuck everything up for you if I get caught again," said Prawn sheepishly. "That's what I told those two from London, too. I want to wait a year before I start getting in trouble again, even if some government types say it's okay. They can always _say_ that and then fuck me over later, aye? But I'd help with this because -- I mean, I could generate a pulse from the parking lot and drive away, no reason for me to stay long enough to get arrested."

"Yeah. Yeah, that might work, actually. If you're sure you'd only be wrecking property."

"Worst case scenario, possibility of electrical fires, if the heated wires cause sparks in the wrong places," Prawn said. "Damage to people, probably not. Something like a pacemaker would be fine because the works are sealed inside metal -- that's a Faraday cage. Same as how lightning can strike your car and you wouldn't get hurt if you were inside, yeah?"

"We'll talk it through with everyone else who wants to go," Joel said, trying not to make decisions for everyone else. "And we still need a safe place to put everybody who gets out. But we're getting somewhere."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is probably such an obscure cameo that no one will recognise it, but the character of Father Leo comes from the short-lived '90s ABC series _Nothing Sacred_ , which was bar none the best fictional representation of real-life Catholic clergy on television, ever. It was on for one season in 1998 and got cancelled because of Catholic League protests, and it's never been released on DVD, but you can see most of it on Youtube. Leo was played by the late great character actor Brad Sullivan. I started this chapter by writing my own priest character in here and then I was like "fuck it, this is fanfic, I'ma toss in Leo." Maybe someone out there who remembers the show will enjoy it.
> 
> The story about the pregnant mother with the blood clot is actually how my grandmother died, back when my mom was a kid.


	11. How to Cure a Fanatic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild tw for body horror (canon typical) in this one.

_Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of_  
_men, that Government has blood and bones, it is_  
_many mouths whispering into many ears, sending_  
_telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying_  
_"yes" and "no." ..._  
_A Government is just as secret and mysterious and sensitive_  
_as any human sinner carrying a load of germs,_  
_traditions and corpuscles handed down from_  
_fathers and mothers away back._  
—Carl Sandburg

The intercom buzzed at 2:26 in the morning, one night in early January. Jean-Paul woke up with a shapeless, involuntary noise, the sound of his own body starved for sleep. _Fnnnggh._ He socked the pillow and pushed himself up. Pale fluorescent light spilled in from the hallway -- the policy was open-door whenever possible -- and he caught a glimpse of Jim Hudson and Heather McNeil striding past in uniform, knocking on the few doors that were closed.

Jean-Paul groped for the rubber-soled slippers he'd been given. The floors were cold here. Everything was cold, really. It was an office building, and it had never been intended for people to actually live in. He didn't turn his bedroom light on, unable to face any more of that fluorescent light than he had to. He didn't stand up, but raised his voice slightly and said, "What are we _doing_?"

"Everybody up," Hudson said from down the hall.

"For what?"

"We're Oscar Mike, everybody get moving."

Transparent leadership, as always. Jean-Paul swore and rubbed his face, trying to clear the grit from his eyelids. 

Aurora poked her head in his room. "Action time!"

"Why?" He flopped back down on the bed, face-first into the pillow. "And how and who and...which? Have you even been to bed yet?"

"Women are more resilient to stress than men, you know," she said, slapping his shoulder lightly to make him sit up. "Hudson said something about a power failure."

"Then why are the lights on in my face right now?"

"In Quebec, hello. Big power failure."

"They need a team of mutants from DND for a power failure?"

Aurora sighed. "In Repentigny, okay? I'm not supposed to know all that stuff you told me, so can we just get going so that I can be briefed and then I can act like it's news? _Faut se grouiller_." 

"Yeah, I'll get moving, all right. This is what I want to be doing," said Jean-Paul, sitting up. "This is my dream, forget about university. Repentigny, fantastic."

"Can I just put some coffee in a syringe and get you back to normal that way?" Aurora gathered up her hair into a ponytail at the back of her head, pulling an elastic off her wrist to secure it. "Needle in the ass? It's a mission, okay, it's exciting. Comb your hair, JP. There might be cameras."

Jean-Paul rolled his eyes, and chased her out of the room so that he could get into uniform. They had new ones now, guaranteed not to shear into pieces at high speeds. _We'll see about that._ Through the thick double-glass windows he could see that the sky was a gloomy orange-charcoal colour (brown, really), the low clouds reflecting the light from the sodium streetlights. Probably snowing, although the glass was too thick for him to tell. He didn't like flying in the snow; the cold didn't bother him, but the lack of visibility sure did. And the wetness, when they landed. Maybe there wouldn't be any need for flying tonight. _Yeah, they'll let you sit in the car. Get into this._

He almost forgot that they were going out on a real mission, and remembered as he was going out the door that they had to wear the body armour, which had only arrived in shipment a few days ago. The suit was heavy, and it had a strange smell, a mix of synthetics and the faintly musty smell of the Alpha Flight quartermasters in the basement. He picked at the gorget piece at his neck, trying to make it admit a bit of movement, and the image in the mirror suddenly gave him a shock. Jean-Paul Martin Beaubier (he still wasn't sure which name he wanted to use) would never in his life have predicted this, that he would be getting ready for a mission and adjusting his body armour. He'd been planning a typical course for his life: CÉGEP, university, job. When he was eleven, he'd wanted to be a pro skier; up until a couple of months ago he'd been thinking more about business or economics. Then his DNA had made the decision for him, effectively -- he'd be stupid _not_ to be taking this opportunity. 

Even if they were waking him up at two in the morning.

From elsewhere in the building, Jean-Paul could hear Walter Langkowski moaning in pain. It was Langkowski's mutation, a monstrous secondary form that was about ten feet tall and covered with fur. His codename was Sasquatch. Apparently the shift was pretty painful. The first time Jean-Paul had heard that sound -- no one had warned him -- he'd sped down the hall to Langkowski's room in less than half a second, thinking that the guy was having a heart attack. Did you yell during a heart attack? Something, anyway. Something life-threatening.

All he had found in the room was Langkowski laid out on the floor, naked (a sight that was traumatic enough on its own), his body twisted and -- and still twisting, stretching with awful bony pops and sounds of straining tissue. Long, shaggy fur the colour of a grizzly bear was sprouting all over the man's body. Jean-Paul took one look and the thought came to him that he needed to throw up, but he couldn't tear himself away from the sight. 

He'd seen that whatever was happening, it was at least...controlled. Langkowski was trying to breathe, his face red with the pain, fists balled up and tendons standing out in his neck, and he'd been muttering snatches of a Hindu mantra. _"Asato ma sat gamaya, tamaso ma jyotir gamaya, mrityor-ma amritam gamaya, om shanti shanti shantih..."_

Even now, Jean-Paul could make out the words, the few words that carried through the halls. _Shanti shanti shantih._ The mantra helped with the pain, Langkowski said. Helped him keep his own mind, even when his body changed. 

So things could be worse.

In the conference room, when the whole team was gathered together, including the lumbering presence of Sasquatch, Hudson read them some report in thin, telegraphed language.

"...reported to police by informant from a payphone several miles from the perimeter of the area at twelve fifteen a.m. Power outage extends from Repentigny into much of Laval and Montreal. Phone lines down, mobile phone signal from all carriers unavailable. Cause unknown."

"That's it?" Aurora said.

Hudson gave her a look. "Walter, explain to the young lady why this is significant."

Sasquatch cleared his throat, an intimidating noise. "An ordinary power outage wouldn't have any effect on mobile phone signals or land lines."

"And?" Hudson prompted.

"And," Sasquatch continued reluctantly, "Mobile phones use electromagnetic radiation in the microwave range."

Aurora bit her lip. She was doing an okay job of acting like this was news. "Prawn?"

"Dudley," Hudson confirmed. "The CRIM database doesn't know of any other mutants in Eastern Canada with that sort of power over the electromagnetic spectrum. A power outage with these features is either Francis Dudley or a very tiny nuclear attack."

"The distinction might be academic," said Sasquatch.

"Do we know if he's aware of his upper limits?" Heather asked.

"No," said Hudson. "We don't know if _he's_ aware of it. It's not the kind of thing you can practice in the backyard, so how would he? Government policy is to keep some CRIM data test results secret for exactly this reason."

Heather pursed her lips and looked up at Hudson. "I'm not sure the team's ready for this."

"We'd better be. There isn't anybody else."

"This is ridiculous," Jean-Paul said. "Prawn wouldn't -- he wouldn't _nuke_ anybody. He--"

Sasquatch broke in. "He just destroyed every piece of equipment containing a computer chip within a radius of several miles. The people who live there are incommunicado. What if someone needs an ambulance? Fire department? EMPs cause wires to get superheated, that causes sparks, sparks cause electrical fires. What if Dudley had slipped and flooded the whole town with lethal levels of radiation? Hell, maybe he did. We won't know until a few hours or days from now, when people start dropping like flies. Francis Dudley just did the equivalent of spraying bullets in a shopping centre. If nobody dies, that'll be good luck, not good management. He deserves to be arrested."

"Does everyone know who this guy is but me?" Bridget said.

"He's one of Joel McCree's crew," Sasquatch said. "Alias King Prawn, the skinny British kid with the horse face."

"Oh." 

"We wanted him," Hudson said. "We couldn't get him. I keep wondering what we could have offered him -- this wouldn't have happened if we'd been able to keep a closer eye. But it doesn't matter now. I know why McCree engineered this, and I know we'll find him at the scene too. If we can get him as an accessory we'll certainly try. Not that anyone has the first clue about how to keep someone like McCree behind bars."

* * *

Even in the darkness, Kathleen could tell when the power went out.

The lights in the hallway burned out in silence, the radiators ceased their rattling, and a wail went up from one of the other wards, but what she noticed first was the sudden implosion of the boundaries. She heard more minds, her range expanding back outward to its usual distance, the volume turned back up. She could hear the minds of the guards and nurses again, and felt worry trickling into her head from the switchboard operator two floors down because Neurocherche had a generator and what were the chances of both going down at once?

In the other bed, Ling awoke with a gasp, thrashing in the blankets. Everyone in the ward was waking up, hands to their heads. That same old human motion, as if some instinctive part of the brain still believed that thoughts were things, that you could press them away like air bubbles from under a wet cloth. That you could hold them in. It was worse than losing control in a mall or a classroom -- there you would only hear the ordinary thoughts of ordinary people, but here at Neurocherche if you took down your walls you only saw an infinite field of mirrors, eyes staring into other eyes.

But somewhere in all the recursive internal noise and confusion, Kathleen heard minds that she recognised. She knew those images: a long table set with plates and bowls, the curls of the steam over the industrial pots on the stove, a kitschy postcard of the Virgin Mary with that perplexing caption, _Elle aime les faibles_. She loves the weak. Kathleen could even hear all their remembered doubts: they'd all been trying to think of anything but this, and Paul had pointed out that it was about time they bought some serious flashlights. And the way it feels when you can't talk or think, you can't, everything is set in motion so you just pray. She knew how it felt to be certain, then, not of the outcome but of everything else. Like being on a rollercoaster when it's too late to change your mind and get off -- that was what faith was like. _All will be well. Even if it won't be._ There were thoughts in her head that she couldn't unthink, certainty so vulnerable to doubt that all objections washed straight through it. Enough doubts piled up somehow cancelled each other out and became acceptance. She could hear that same repeated murmur in the back of her head, the one she'd heard that first day that she'd felt this particular presence in the clinic. _Quia per sanctam crucem tuam redemisti mundum._ The words weren't even important. It was an orientation of the heart, like leaves towards the sun. Like a satellite dish aimed at the sky.

Kathleen was breathing hard. The autonomous nervous system got overloaded, when everything was loud like this. You could forget to breathe, forget to let your heart beat. There was no question of shielding, not when there was this much noise, not when you couldn't even find the borders of your own mind. Might as well try to block out neutrinos. Radio waves. No one thought to put their systems behind Faraday cages? They deserved what they got. These were dangerous days, and you couldn't rely on probabilities to keep you safe anymore. No sense feeling guilty. It felt good, a bit too good, letting that thick rich pulse of microwave radiation out on those noisy circuits. You had to be careful. Everything was so delicate, so fine like a spiderweb, not built to take a punch. A rickety old power grid. Nobody ever learned.

No. No. Kathleen pressed her hands to her face, trying to remind her brain where it ended. Her skin was cold. And in Four West the boys had lost it.

* * *

Joel only began to have serious doubts when he appeared in the hallway of the Neurocherche building and heard, even muffled as his hearing was in the Aphanes, the screams. The telepaths were _screaming,_ as if Prawn really had pulled the plug on some vital life support system. There shouldn't have been anyone there who was dependent on systems like that; the Brits had checked the patient records, and Hodya had emailed Joel a careful _explain it to me like I'm four_ explanation of how the Neurocherche brain implants would react to an EMP pulse. (Encrypted email, if that would help.) Hodya didn't think they all had implants; according to the stolen records, some of them were getting some other form of therapy. So she'd said. Those with implants might have the device switched off accidentally, but that wouldn't be life-threatening, except in the sense that a seizure could potentially be life-threatening.

This was only supposed to be property damage. 

But when he heard the screams, Joel knew with a sickening wave of certainty that he might well have just killed people. He could have killed them, and he didn't understand the implications of the strategy he'd chosen -- not well enough to say whether it was safe or not. He'd been relying on other people to tell him it was okay.

He found himself in Kathleen's room, although he didn't remember passing through the hall into the girls' ward. Kathleen was curled up in a ball with the heels of her hands driven into her eye sockets, as if she had a migraine. Joel came up beside her and let himself be seen -- maybe it was just that she looked so much like his cousin, or maybe it was that she had been the one to manipulate Paul into a near-escape, but Joel felt closer to Kathleen, like she was an ally. She could lead them out. He knew they couldn't do it without at least one of the telepaths helping them.

She couldn't see him, though. Or rather, she didn't look up. Joel took a chance and became solid enough to touch her shoulder. "Kathleen."

"Stop, stop it, go back. Please." She hit him with her mind, not really meaning to. Too much adrenaline. He felt the blow in his mind like an elbow in the mouth. "You're easier when I can't feel you."

"Sorry," he said, when his thoughts swam back into focus, and he faded back into almost-nothingness. "Sorry. We're trying to get you out of here."

"I know."

"Of course. Of course you know. It's okay, I'm sorry. I said we'd come to help you and we came. Just -- we're going to need your help, and we're not going to hurt anybody. Not the patients, not the guards." The hall outside was in chaos. The guards were yelling at each other. "The disruptors are off. We just need to make them quiet. The other patients, the ones screaming. Or maybe you can just make the guards think it's quiet. Whichever way is easier."

"I can't, I can't, I can hardly think myself..."

It was dark. The air was too warm, smelling of scorched plastic and ozone. One of the guards outside was limned against the thin light from the window, showing a black box to the others. "Look at this," he was saying. "I pried the back off to check the battery and—can you even see it? The plastic's hot, shit's melted together. Fused solid."

"Maybe someone should go check outside—"

"Who? Jesus fuck, we need every pair of hands in Four West. Things are getting hairy in there. Little freaks went insane the second the disruptors went offline."

Joel turned his attention back to Kathleen. "You can do this. You can."

"I can't."

Her fingers clenched and unclenched, bones locking under the skin. Handfuls of the blankets. Joel felt like cold hands were running up and down his back, and he knew it had to be worse for her, for anyone who could really feel the suffering of someone else. Paul was waiting a floor below them, but he'd lose his lunch once the patients got close.

"Come back," Kathleen said to him after a moment. She held out her hand and waggled the fingers, as if she wanted him to hold it.

He became solid again, cautiously, and let her have his hand. "What do you need?"

She crashed into his mind like a car driving through a garage door, cutting into him until she found what she needed. A flipbook of memories flickered past, pausing on a waiting room in St. Rita's, a motel room in Toronto with no air conditioning, a thickly dark state park in Vermont where nothing at all seemed to be alive but the trees, a tiny island in the water. She was looking for the quietest thing, the very quietest--

Little starlings with bright yellow beaks, pecking in the new green grass of the side lawn. The twitterings echoed off the stone, loud enough that they seemed to be in the rafters of the church itself. The air smelled like stale water, a dusty smell, a whiff of frankincense now and then if you turned your head just the right way. St. Joseph's church on Laurier Avenue by the University of Ottawa campus, years ago, back before the marauders took away the statues. Imperfect plaster statues, with children's pencil scrawls on the feet of St Patrick and a sickly pinkish cast to the snake under the Virgin's feet. Ugly and outdated. A coin box by the candles which left your fingers smelling of metal, and a dusty curtain on the confessional. She didn't like this memory, this place, but he did, which was all she needed. She could use his fondness for it, his memory of feeling peaceful here. The light in the sanctuary lamp was so still, so red, and now the silence was big enough that it drowned out everything, even the squalling birds outside. She could feel that silence with him, as if the two of them were sitting in the pew side by side. Or one inside the other. All they could hear was the space between thoughts, the silence in which everything began.

Her hand loosened around his, and she licked her lips.

"Okay," whispered Joel, when he had his breath back. "You can stop this, Kathleen."

Yes, she could. He felt it, as she projected that stillness outwards, over the hall and the wards. _Go down. Quiet._ Bodies fell down, on the floor, on beds. _Go to sleep._

A radio fell out of a guard's hand and skittered across the floor.

Kathleen opened her eyes. "Okay. Better."

Joel's head hurt. He was glad to fade back into the Aphanes, but he couldn't let himself fall too far. "All right." He spoke first in French, then in English. "We're going down by the stairs. Elevators aren't working. There's a truck in the parking lot."

Will had rented them a U-Haul. "Stuffing this with people instead of furniture won't be the _most_ unsafe or illegal thing you'll be doing tonight," he'd said. "Doesn't need a special license to drive it, which is the main thing, and it doesn't draw much attention. Not comfy, but it's a short trip back into the city, so anyone can deal with being cramped for an hour."

Mars was with them that night, and she walked over the sleeping bodies of the guards to meet them in the hallway. "I thought you said there weren't more than thirty."

"I was guessing. You think we'll have room?"

"I don't know. I guess we can force it. The boys in the other ward have lost it completely, though -- how are you going to get them out?"

Joel looked inside Four West, and instinctively drew back again, even though nothing could hurt him in his intangible state. "Jesus."

A couple of the boys were sitting still on their beds, rocking back and forth or just sobbing. Others were -- _rioting_ was the word that came to mind, although there couldn't have been more than ten. They seemed like a much bigger crowd than they were, throwing chairs and pillows, wrestling with each other, yelling wordlessly. Two guards had fallen in here, and beside one guard's hand there lay a syringe.

None of the boys attempted to leave the ward, and none even ventured into the hall. They didn't even seem to be aware that the hall existed; none looked at Joel or Mars, none glanced up when the flashlight's beam passed over them, none heard their voices.

Kathleen came up behind him. "Don't bother," she said.

"Why not? What's wrong with them?"

"They're a failed experiment. Or maybe an accident, a mistake. We don't know. There's nothing left to rescue there, no will to tap into. Like a boneless chicken, you know? Nothing to hold them up."

"Yeah. She's right." Mars reached over and pulled the door shut, harder than she needed to. Her hands were shaking.

"We're not leaving them here," Joel said, but he knew he wasn't fooling anyone. "Mars!"

"No. Can't do it, _chou-chou_." Mars' voice was quiet. "Whatever got them, it got them already. We have to leave." She'd already turned back down the hall, towards the elevator.

The girls from Kathleen's ward had crept out into the hall. Twelve of them. Twelve little girls in two straight lines. Joel looked back at the closed door of Four West. _What do I do? What do I do?_

No answer. No bubbling forth of intuition, no memory of good advice from Father Gilles or Professor Xavier or his father or anyone. He turned back to Kathleen. "You can't do _anything_ with them? You can't just make them leave with us?"

"They're imprinted with a command to stay in the ward. It overrides everything else."

"But..."

"You don't understand. There's nothing left in there," Kathleen said again. "We _can't._ Or I would have, when I put the guards to sleep. Trust me, okay?"

There weren't enough hands to physically force the boys to leave, even with the generous assumption that the Professor (or somebody) could have restored their minds later on. It wasn't possible. Joel knew he was doing something terrible, but he couldn't think of any other options. The door was open, and that was all he could do for them. "All right. All right, we'll go."

And they took off for the stairs. Joel had never seriously run before, never for his life or for anyone else's. He didn't have to now; it didn't require extra energy to move quickly when he was intangible, since he wasn't really using muscles or burning calories. There was a sort of mental effort, like focusing on an exam, but that was it. The girls were following, their housecoats flapping like awkward wings, footsteps slapping on the concrete steps.

Neurocherche was not a tall building, luckily enough, but it was full of twisting corridors and odd architectural choices -- hallways that looked promising but which led only to a supply closet and an alarm panel. None of them knew it well, particularly the patients, who had never been allowed off the ward. They came to a locked door once with an electronic code pad, and Joel cursed himself for being an idiot and letting Prawn zap the place indiscriminately...and then one of the patients simply pulled the screws from the hinges and lifted the door away with telekinesis.

Kathleen's friend Ling had remote viewing powers, and although she knew the layout of the building, she had a poor sense of direction. Joel wasn't sure how that was possible, but it was; she would direct them to go left instead of right every time it came up. "Other left, other left!" In the dark, with only one flashlight in Mars' hand, they followed two dead ends before they found the way out. Even the red _Sortie - Exit_ signs were unlit.

They were in the front lobby when things went to shit.

In the pale circle of the flashlight, Joel recognised Jeanne-Marie with her brother. And pale, straw-blonde Niko, and Bridget from the hospital, and Corporal McNeil. And behind them, some huge physical mutant, massive and hairy, stooped under the ceiling.

And notably absent... "Where's Paul, he and Prawn--"

"They're in custody already," said Corporal McNeil. "Just what did you think you were doing, McCree?"

"What do you mean _in custody_ \--"

"Shall I inform you that we are a force affiliated with the Department of National Defence and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, that you are trespassing on these premises, that you are indirectly responsible for the destruction of quite a lot of property, and that you could very well be charged with kidnapping?"

She wasn't in an RCMP uniform, but a thick black bodysuit that looked like it was more than just fabric. Kathleen gave Joel a hard mental shove, and sent, _I can't read her, I can't read any of them. They've got disruptors on, somewhere, maybe in their clothes..._

"These people," Joel said, trying to sound steady, "these people have been subject to medical abuse, given unnecessary treatments so that the company could exploit their abilities--"

Corporal McNeil interrupted. "Do you have any proof of that, McCree, or are you just grandstanding?"

"Look at them! That's twelve witnesses behind me. And what was done to the boys in the ward upstairs--"

"And you didn't think you needed to call the authorities and let them deal with it."

"Oh, you think I didn't? You don't know me that well from your file?" Joel snapped. "I played telephone tag for six hours with the Ministry, like a good Canadian. Called the MPP, called the Health Minister herself. Somebody's intern finally got back to me and told me that Neurocherche checked out okay with the ethics board. And that was it. The police said they'd look into it. So what? What are you going to do for these people?"

"The law is the law," Corporal McNeil said. "You can't just decide you don't like how the process works and run in to cause chaos in a private company. You certainly can't melt every computer chip in the building with an EMP. You've crossed the line."

Joel had opened his mouth to answer, although he wasn't sure what he was going to say, when suddenly the huge hairy mutant spasmed and lunged, throwing his immense weight at the rest of his own team, moving with the clumsy inertia of a marionette. The twins darted out of the way but hit an invisible wall like pigeons flying into a window.

"Go, go, go--" Kathleen tried to push Joel but her hands went through him. "Don't just watch, idiot, Kara and Ana have to hold them while we run--"

"So go, I'm not leaving until I know where they sent Paul and Prawn," Joel said. "What are they going to do to me?"

"You want to _bet_ they can't do anything to you?" said Mars from the door. "They have your DNA on file, they have labs, and right now two teenage girls are the only thing keeping them from taking their best shot so _get moving._ "

If the lights had been on, the Department H team probably would have looked stupid: a lumbering beast hurling his weight around, the others scrambling not to get hit, and Jean-Paul and Jeanne-Marie struggling against the forcefield like mimes. But that was all down to two girls, one with purple skin and the other with orange hair and white eyes, and they were backing out the door, unsteady with the strain of holding their escape together.

Twelve little girls in two straight lines. Fuck. _Fuck._

For a few moments Joel was frozen, but then the rational answer came to him, and it was cold: staying would not help Paul, or Prawn. While Joel might think that staying was a good-faith effort that would convince Department H to give him information, in reality it wouldn't do jack shit and it would waste time. Probably the reason that they'd whisked Paul and Prawn away so quickly was so that they'd have a bargaining chip. They would be asking, not giving. Anyway, the Brits were more likely to know where _in custody_ was, and then Joel could go break in, even if no one else came with him.

Corporal McNeil was on her feet again, although still behind the forcefield, and Joel drifted closer to her as he passed by, heading for the door. "I'm taking my friends back, you know," he said. _"You can't stop me."_

* * *

Paul hadn't even seen it coming. He'd been waiting at the bottom of the stairs for Joel and Mars to get there with the kids, Prawn watching the door. The front door; Paul was closer to the back. Then, in the space of a few seconds, he'd heard the front window shatter, a _thwap_ of some large projectile cutting through the air, and Prawn's body hitting the floor.

The Beaubier twins had come crashing straight through the window at an incredible speed, not even hurt by it, flying like bullets and tackling Prawn to the ground to administer a syringe of some fast-acting tranquiliser. Paul took a second to realise that Aurora also had a rifle over her shoulder, and that somewhere in that blur of action she had shot him with a tranquiliser dart too. Oh. Thwap. Sure, made sense now.

Faster than a speeding bullet.

Paul woke up in the back of a van, handcuffed, blindfolded. They were en route, moving somewhere, and Prawn was beside him; Paul knew his smell.

Someone was talking. "No. No, this is a disaster. Well, why wasn't Walt wearing a -- look, we discussed this, his immunity to telepaths is _highly_ variable and he should be wearing a disruptor, I don't care if it has to go on a collar around his neck. Christ. Like it even would have helped, from what you're saying. So Neurocherche is trashed, and they're all gone, that what you're telling me? Oh, he did? Of course he did..."

"What's happening?" Paul asked in English, knowing that the chances of a real answer were low. "Where are we, where are we going?"

"You're going to a holding facility, okay, Gauguin?" said the angry English voice. "You've broken the law and you're under arrest. It's not just Mile End this time for either of you."

"Where are the others?"

"We're going after them. Metro police and Sûreté du Québec are on the lookout too, not just the feds."

Paul was fighting down panic. "I am a Canadian citizen," he said, voice rising, "and even mutants have a right to know who's arresting them. I have a right to know your name and see your ID, and you have no good legal reason to blindfold me."

A sigh. "I'll let you see my ID, but I do have a legal reason to restrict your vision. We're travelling to a facility whose location is classified and you're not allowed to see where we're driving. If I come back there to talk to you, are you going to behave?"

"What are you afraid of?" said Paul, and then thought of another thing to be afraid of himself. "Why isn't Prawn talking--"

"He's still sedated, and he will be until we can get him into some gear that will block his powers." The man moved over in the van and pulled up the blindfold, then put his hand on Paul's jaw to angle his face upward in the right direction. "James Hudson, with Alpha Flight, and here's my ID. Take a good look. You've been charged with breaking and entering, further charges pending investigation of the site."

"Okay, but why aren't you taking me to a normal safety centre?" Paul said, staring at the ID until his eyelids slid shut again. He was still tired. Awake, but it felt good to close his eyes.

"At this point we have to remand Dudley to a federal holding facility, due to the sheer scope of his abilities," Hudson said tightly, blindfolding Paul again. "It's primarily for research and public safety. And you're going too because we have good reason to believe that putting you in Mile End or somewhere would just lead to McCree and his associates disrupting the place."

"What, you're punishing me for having friends?"

"Your friends are basically terrorists, Paul," said Hudson. "That's what this behaviour is called. Do you even know what an EMP _is_? Everyone in this town who needed a computer chip to make their cars go, they've got useless hunks of metal sitting in their driveway. All their electronics fried. Regular people trying to pay the bills, people who need to get to work to feed their families. Fucked over, thanks to you guys. What made you try a stunt like that, anyway?”

Paul was trying not to lean the back of his head against the side of the van, because the vibration hurt. “Cars and electronics can be replaced. Insurance can pay for broken objects. But you can't buy new kids. What was happening in that lab was wrong. If Prawn fucked it up and broke things he shouldn't have broken, that's too bad -- really, that sucks for the people in Repentigny. But nobody else would help us do the right thing. Definitely not you."

Hudson said nothing for a few seconds. Then: "You're really sure you're the good guys, huh?"

"At least we're trying."

"I don't have time to debate morality with you," said Hudson, going back to the front of the van. "Sleep the drugs off and I'll wake you when we have to stop."


	12. A Harsh and Dreadful Thing

_I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you,_  
_for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing_  
_compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy_  
_for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the_  
_sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only_  
_the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with_  
_all looking on and applauding as though on the stage._  
_But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some_  
_people too, perhaps, a complete science._  
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, _The Brothers Karamazov_

Nour had a shot glass full of Pepto-Bismol, and knocked it back with a grimace, licking the inside of the glass to get all of it. Their stomach was full of acid from fear, and they watched the minute hand crawl around the kitchen clock, the newspaper and two books in front of them sitting unread. The TV was on in the other room, but Nour couldn't face the oblivious voices on TV right now; the others weren't watching it either. The kids who didn't know what was going on passed through the house cautiously (because they knew _something_ was happening), and there were few of them: most knew enough to scent trouble on the wind, and wouldn't stay in a place where it was likely to alight. Nour thought of peas or bullets rattling around in a can, all the lucky uninvolved bastards finding their way out of this house until the cops could just pop them open and arrest everyone who was left.

Someone turned off the TV, turned on the radio, and that was the moment when the lights went out. A groan went up from everyone in the kitchen -- things were obviously going south down in Repentigny.

 _"Fuck's sake,"_ Nour said, pushing violently away from the table, chair legs scraping over the tiles. Pure deep darkness, disorienting. "Fuck Prawn. Get us some lights, somebody? Anyone here who can see in this?"

"I'll find some." Ox had good night vision, but even he had to move slowly and carefully in this dark. No streetlights coming in from the window, no moon visible through the thick clouds, nothing. "It'd be nice if Paul were here, right about now."

"Well, everyone just sit tight, okay? They're coming back." _Please let that be true_ , Nour thought. "It'll just be an hour or so."

They had emergency supplies in a drawer, flashlights and candles, and soon the kitchen was illuminated. Nobody left the room to go into the shadows, but Mary Jane and Edouard slipped down from upstairs to take candles. They were some of the desperate ones, the ones not willing to go out into the cold in search of something easier, something less risky. They couldn't defend themselves. They were physical mutants -- Mary Jane had fur, sleek fur like a seal's, and Edouard thick grey skin, mottled and armoured -- so they weren't safe on the streets in any situation where John Q. Public had his back up.

The candles were white beeswax tapers from Saint Sulpice, leftovers from an old box that the church had donated to the house, high quality with a faint scent of honey. They burned down slowly, but they were half gone when Nour heard a truck pull up outside. Too late to snuff the candles and put out the flashlights -- Maison St-Jean-de-Dieu sat on high ground and its lights were visible from the end of the block at least.

_It better be them._

Nour went to the door, clinging to the wall as they went even though they could see well enough by candlelight, and waited. Slamming doors and the trundling shuttering sound from the back of the truck. That might be the crew coming home or it might be police. Police with a nice big paddy-wagon to fill up with mutants. Nour waited.

Footsteps, a pause, and then a knock. Nour waited, not about to answer until they heard the password. That was the plan. Even if it was Joel or Paul's voice, no opening the door without the password.

And it was Joel's voice. "It's us, Saint Dot got us home."

Saint Dot, that was the password. Nour slid back the bolt and undid the chain -- they rarely locked the door in the house, since someone was almost always home, but tonight they were huddled and hiding, as if they could really keep back anyone who meant to hurt them.

Joel and Mars were on the doorstep with a group of girls in housecoats and pajamas -- a much smaller group than Nour had been expecting. The girls streamed inside immediately, with the lack of fear that comes from being outside in the cold for too long. Any kind of warmth would do. "Where's Paul?" Nour said, feeling a sudden stomach-plummet of dread. "Where's Prawn, what..."

"Paul and Prawn got arrested," Joel said, coming inside with Mars. "I didn't even see it happening, it must have been quick while we were upstairs with the girls -- Department H was ready for us, they came to stop the action. We got out because the girls are...Christ, they're incredibly fucking strong. They're amazing."

" _Ya Allah_ , come in and sit down -- what the fuck are we gonna do?" said Nour, bringing Joel into the front room to sit on the couch, because he was looking shocky and weird. The house had a little poster up in the kitchen about how to handle seizures, but Nour wasn't around enough to really know the whole procedure, and it was usually Paul who took care of it anyway. "Are you okay, do you need meds or anything?"

"I'm fine, I'm -- no, actually, let's not be idiots about this," Joel said wearily, and got his keys out of his pocket. "This little key here. Top floor in the bathroom medicine cabinet, could you bring down the bottle that says clonazepam? Thanks."

"Gotcha." Nour took a flashlight and ran up the stairs to the top floor; they'd never been in Joel and Paul's room and were a little surprised to see two beds there instead of one, but whatever. They unlocked the medicine cabinet and stared for a second at the shelves that were completely occupied with...well, medicines. No extra toothpaste, no contact lens junk, no shaving stuff. All that was on a shelf by the sink, but the cabinet was just pills. Yeah, this was probably worth having a lock on the door, Nour thought, going through each bottle to see which was which. Trying not to be nosy, as difficult as it was. 

They found the clonazepam, locked up, and came downstairs again. "Here ya go. Water?"

"Don't need it," Joel said, taking a couple of tablets dry under his tongue. A chalky taste, faintly sweet. "Thank you. Uh, okay, yeah. Action. Plans. I'm like 90% sure that they didn't just take Prawn and Paul to a regular safety centre, but just in case, can we ask somebody to start calling around on our list of safety centres in the metro area? The phones are working here, right?"

"They must be." Nour got their phone out and clicked the sleep button, checking signal. "Signal's a little shittier than usual, but we can call around. Did Prawn fuck up the _phones_ too?"

"In Repentigny for sure, the cell towers at least. I don't know about landlines. And I'm not sure how far that extended, either. I think he just wrecked everything locally and it turned into a big cascading outage because the power grid sucks so bad in Quebec. Okay, so find someone who doesn't mind the phone and ask them to do that, please? And I want to get the Brits over here, and I also want to make a call to Westchester. I think. But the Brits first. I can just text them, that's easy. Can someone else find places to sleep for the girls, if we get out some sleeping bags and air mattresses?"

"Grace will do the phone thing and I'll help the girls find beds," Nour said. "Will you just lie down for ten minutes and take it easy? I'm gonna tell Mars the same thing, it's not just you."

"Yeah, I'll be good," said Joel, lying down on the couch. He got his phone out of his pocket -- Prawn had shielded everyone in the truck from his EMP, so the phone wasn't a useless melted brick. He found Faiza's number in his contacts and thumbed out a text to her: _Colonies need help from Mother England, so as they say in Massachusetts, Come over and help us?_

After a pause, Faiza responded: _what did you DO_

_we're not sure yet but please literally come over and help?_

_okay okay 20 minutes_ , Faiza replied.

Joel let his phone sit on his chest and put his head down on the pillow to wait. He hated lying there when everyone else was working, but it would be a lot worse if he had a seizure tonight from the stress and the weird schedule -- that would leave him foggy-headed and in pain for much longer. He couldn't afford to mortgage his energy like that when Paul was depending on him.

After a few minutes, resting with his eyes closed, he felt a feather-light brush against his mind. Ling was standing there in the dark front room beside the couch, barefoot, all in white: flannel pajama bottoms and t-shirt, terrycloth robe hanging slack from her shoulders. The effect was angelic and strange, more so because her head was shaved, nothing but a dark shadow of stubble. He didn't know if she liked it that way or if someone at Neurocherche had done it to her. "Hi," she said softly. "Your name's not Richard McBrien."

"God, did I seriously not even introduce myself in all that chaos?" Joel said, sitting up. "No, my name's Joel. Sorry. Are you okay, did they find you somewhere to bed down for the night?"

Ling nodded. "I just had to tell you that I'm the one who's been spying on your house."

"What?"

"They made me do it. Remote viewing, my range is really big. It used to be more normal, just about a mile or so around, but they gave me some new drug at the lab and it made me stronger. I can see for..." She slowed, then went on, "A long way. And I've got a brother who's a mutant too, a younger brother, and they told me if I don't do a good job then they'll have to get him in and use him too, so I _had to_ \--"

"Okay, okay," Joel said, mind reeling a bit, but he sat up and made room for Ling to sit down on the couch. "Nobody's mad at you here, we know you didn't have a choice about it. They were hurting you, they were threatening you. We're on your side, I promise."

"But I still had to tell you it was me. That's all I can do now to make it right. So like -- at least you know they can't watch you anymore, right? It's something. I don't know where they took your friend because I can only focus on one thing at a time, and they had me concentrating on watching your house while the...all the weird stuff was happening at the lab. But I know where they sent a _lot_ of people." She picked up Joel's phone from the couch cushion and handed it to him. "Unlock and show me a map."

He pressed his thumbprint to the button and opened up Maps, handed it back to her. Ling zoomed and panned a bit until she found an unmarked spot in the countryside near a village called St-Roch-de-L'Achigan. "There's this teeny airport there, big fences, lots of security. They sent a lot of people there. The boys from Four West all went, but they got sent back. Broken. I don't know where the planes go, but they leave from here. They might have sent your friend there because that's what they like to do to mutants who are, like, being pains in the ass, or someone they think they can use. Or someone they think they can improve somehow. Lot of times all those things coincide."

"Oh my God." Joel stared at the screen, a blank stretch of land with a _Rue Industrielle_ along one edge, some grey boxes on the map indicating government property. "Just...God, Ling, I'm sorry. We're going to try to get you all back somewhere safe, we really will. How's home, is home safe for you?"

"I want to go back," Ling whispered. "But my mom thinks I'm sick, she'll be mad that I left the clinic. She'll just try to put me somewhere else--"

"We'll work it out, okay?" Joel had no idea how, but he was determined to do it. "We'll try to get everyone where they want to be. It might take some time, but we really will."

* * *

Hudson jostled Paul and Prawn awake in a dark, windy place, blindfolds back on. Noisy. An airstrip, Paul realised when it was too late to do anything about it -- but what could he have done? Run, blindfolded, and hope that Prawn would be able to apprehend the situation and fight through the sedatives? _Never let them take you to a second location._

"Where is this federal holding facility supposed to be?" he asked, aiming the question towards where he thought Hudson was, based on smell. Hudson smelled like pepper and ground mustard seeds, dry and hot, frustration and impotent rage. There was something else, something further that the man wanted to be doing, but he couldn't do it.

"I told you the location's classified."

"I thought you just meant this airstrip."

"Nope. Whole trip. --You got a ramp and a gurney for this guy? Right there, yeah..." The voices crossed and commingled, clanks and slamming doors, the rush of wind. 

The wind blew cold with a damp edge, that January bite when the temperatures plunged. It had to be thirty below at least, jet fuel and exhaust on the air, and Paul was shivering. Unprotected. His coat was gone, and he didn't remember when that had happened. "I want my coat back." He had to repeat it. "Hey. I want my coat back."

"We're busy. You'll be in the heat again in a few minutes."

"Yeah, you're busy _processing us_ , but you have time to throw me my fucking coat. You've already searched it, you know there's nothing in there. I didn't have a weapon." Loyal to the vision. But realistically, would it have helped to have a weapon? Paul would never have had the will to swing a crowbar at the Beaubier twins, even in some alternate universe where he could have been fast enough. He wasn't made for this kind of thing. "You know my whole file, you know my mutation makes me do bad in the cold, you _know this_ and if you're doing this on purpose I just want you to know that I see you doing it."

He waited, and then a soft weight hit him in the chest. He flinched, but it was just the mass of his coat, heavy with its quilted down filling, the fake fur around the hood tickling his face as he felt for the sleeves. "Thank you."

Prawn only smelled of sleep, cotton and flax flowers, a chemical edge to it. So he was probably physically okay. Probably. _Most useless powers ever, that's me._ Wheels were rattling and someone was pushing him until he nearly tripped over a metal ledge. Someone moved his hand upward to find a railing, icy cold. 

"Federal agents will be taking you from here," Hudson said. "Some of them are mutants and rest assured, they will know if you try to resist or cause further chaos. Just be smart and do what you're told, and when you get to the facility you'll be able to contact a lawyer."

"Really?"

Hudson sighed. "Yeah, really. Come on, we're not monsters here. Safe trip."

"You too," Paul said automatically, before he realised that he didn't mean it. Someone else was shepherding him up the steps and into the intimidating closeness of fuselage. Paul wasn't a big fan of small spaces or small planes, connecting flights on childhood March Break vacations to Florida, those squashy seats on the little planes. His mother was always harried and panicky in airports, but once they were on the plane she always got him the requisite plastic cups of ginger ale. _Leave the can, please? And we'd like a bag, just in case -- my boy gets sick sometimes._

His mother, if she still gave a vestigial shit, wasn't going to know where he was. Joel might try to let her know, but it was just as possible that he'd think it was better to wait until they knew something for sure. Or that Paul's mother wouldn't take the call or return the voicemail. Or that if she did listen to the message, she'd get even angrier. _You just had to do this, running around like you think you're Robespierre, some big revolutionary, and now you're in trouble and you remember you have a family._

No, Paul thought, he actually had no idea what Joel was likely to do in this situation, but he had a feeling it would be something alarming. Joel was often passive because of his depression, a martyr complex, and maybe a certain detachment that came with his mutation, but sometimes a switch flipped and he did extreme things. It happened pretty reliably when people tried to give him orders or back him into a corner, Paul had noticed, but he'd kept that observation to himself. Sometimes those extreme reactions were effective and sometimes they weren't -- Joel had got his way in the end with Prawn after paying him off, in spite of Prawn's protests. 

And sure, he was biased, but Paul kind of wanted an effective response to this situation.

Someone was at his elbow, taking his coat off again and rolling up his sleeve. "There's really no benefit to you staying awake on this trip," a female voice said. "You'd just be bored, since we still can't take the blindfold off. This will help you sleep."

 _I should be fighting back,_ he thought again while someone tapped his elbow looking for a vein -- they always had trouble finding his veins -- but nothing had changed since the last time he had that guilty thought. _What are you gonna do about it?_

* * *

By the time Faiza and Will came to St. John of God House, Joel was fighting the clonazepam fog with a pot of coffee, the phone in front of him and a photocopied list of the safety centres in the northeast quarter of the city. He was working his way through each one, far past the point of feeling his usual phone anxiety -- he didn't care about stumbling over words or sounding stupid, he just cared about crossing numbers off the list.

" _L-A-L-I-B-E-R-T-E...oui, avec l'accent -- ouais, j'peux attendre..._ " Joel looked up as Faiza came into the sitting room with Will and moved the phone receiver away from his mouth. "Hi, it's fine, they got me on hold. Thanks for coming."

"'Course we came -- who are you talking to?" Faiza said, taking off her coat and piling it next to her on the couch, adjusting the pin in her hijab. "What _happened_?"

"We're working on calling all the safety centres in the city," Joel said, closing and opening his fist; he'd been white-knuckling the phone without noticing. "Two of ours got -- uh, from the beginning, I guess. We went to Neurocherche to get the patients out, and...well, we got some of them. They're stacked like cordwood upstairs and in the basement, twelve girls. There were boys being held there too but we couldn't get them out. But Prawn kind of overshot when he was trying to knock out the wiring in the clinic."

"Hence the mood lighting, I suppose," Will said, nodding at the candles burning on the coffee table. "And people got arrested? Did Department H anticipate that you'd be trying this?"

"Yeah, their team showed up. Maybe I shouldn't be talking about this with the safety centre on the phone but fuck it, the government already knows. They know everything." It was demoralising, a steady drip eroding their privacy. "Department H swept in and dragged Paul and Prawn away before I could get back with the girls. They were fast." It had to have been Aurora and Jean-Paul who got there first and disabled Paul, Joel knew, although he didn't like to think about it. "The girls, the telepath patients, they held the whole team back while we got out. I owe them some thank you cards or something. So Paul and Prawn are 'in custody', I guess, but I have no idea where. They should have gone to Charlemagne or Terrebonne if the government actually cared about jurisdictions or the fucking _law_ , but--"

"Okay, okay, just take it easy," Faiza interrupted. "Don't load up on caffeine, you'll just make the panic worse. And it trashes some anticonvulsant drugs."

"I know." Joel resisted the impulse to say something more snappish than that. "I'm managing my meds okay. I'm not panicking, I'm just angry. So you guys have a vested interest in Prawn, right? Would you help me find him? Just knowing where they're being held, that's all I want..."

"Of course we can help -- we can, right?" Faiza said with a glance at Will.

Will shrugged. "We _can_ do anything we want, so long as we don't get caught. We were supposed to get Dudley and I think it's fair to say that this counts as trying to get him. If the Director doesn't have to answer any awkward questions about the mission then we should be fine. And you know him better than I do, anyway."

"Right, yeah. Right." Faiza laced her fingers together, pressing her hands between her knees for a moment. 

Joel's attention snapped back to the phone when he heard a voice in his ear again, but the woman at the safety centre just told him _no, we don't have anyone named Dudley or Laliberté here._ He thanked her and hung up, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Yeah. So I'm going to call Dr. Xavier in the States and ask him about the telepaths -- I think he'd be pretty interested in helping them. I just don't know who I can shake down to find information about where Paul and Prawn are. One of the girls said that they take a lot of people to this one airstrip up in the hills, St-Roch-de-Something, but she didn't know where the planes go."

"Well, we went through the data on the USB stick, we found...I mean, we knew what we were going to find," said Faiza. "Like Will said, every country seems to have a lab that does this sort of thing. Neurocherche's files refer to it as the Weapon Plus Program, but only at the highest security levels. For the rest of the peons, the health care workers and security staff and so on, they just call it the National Mutant Research Centre. Okay, 'national', sounds like it's above-board, right? We looked them up on the federal government website and found an address in Ottawa and a 1-888 number, but both of them were just cardboard cutouts."

"It's a single office suite in a big building and a pre-recorded phone message that tells you to see the website for official reports. The website mentions 'research facilities across the country,' but that's as specific as they get," Will said. "It's just a cover. So far, all we know about Weapon Plus is that some of the Neurocherche patients were sent there. No minors, only adults whose intake records suggest they were already leading a pretty isolated existence. No one to miss them."

"But we don't know for sure that they sent Paul and Prawn there, right?" Joel said, still hoping that he'd call the next safety centre on the list and hear _yes, we have them in custody._ "Only Department H knows."

"Not even all of Department H, probably just one or two agents," said Will. 

Faiza shook her head. "Let's focus on one thing at a time. Right now you're calling safety centres, and you're going to talk to Professor X. Either one of those tactics might help. Once we finish doing that, we'll know whether or not it's necessary to go to Department H. I think we can do that quietly, yeah?"

"Yeah," Joel said quietly, playing with the spirals of the phone cord. "I'm not gonna throw a big ethics tantrum over it, if that's what you mean."

"I wouldn't say it was a tantrum, c'mon."

"I thought about staying with them -- the Deparment H crew -- while Mars left with the telepaths. Surrender and hope that they tell me what I want to know...Christ, that sounds naive. It _is_ naive. I just assumed there was nothing they could actually do to me, but Mars said, like, how do I know that? My DNA's on file with the government, so how long would it take them to come up with something that would disrupt what I do?"

"Depends. Maybe months, maybe never," said Faiza. "Having DNA on file wouldn't help that much, necessarily, unless they had another mutant to experiment with who had similar traits. But I'm glad you didn't take the risk, because yeah, those people are not your friends and they're not going to help you just for the sake of spreading sunshine. Sorry to say."

 _But you guys are my friends, right?_ Joel didn't say it out loud, because it was churlish and because if he wasn't going to trust them then he was back to square one, playing phone tag and hoping to strike it lucky. He liked Faiza. He wanted to trust her. He wanted to trust somebody. "Okay," he said, checking the time. "It's too late to phone Dr. Xavier, so I may as well wait until morning. Calling the safety centres can wait too -- if Paul's there then the situation isn't that serious, and if he's not then sitting up all night calling won't help anyway. I know I have to sleep, I know nobody wants my brain shorting out."

"I was expecting you to fight me on that." Faiza smiled a little, but it died halfway. "Yeah, we'll all save the candles and tuck in, I suppose. The power might be back on by morning and it'll all seem a bit less...massive. When I was in my surgery rotation as a med student, they told me 'eat when you can, sleep when you can.' And 'don't fuck with the pancreas,' but that probably won't come up," she added. 

He laughed a bit, and turned to a blank page in his notebook. "Don't rule anything out." 

"We'll all figure this out somehow, Joel. We'll find them, _insha'allah_."

"Yeah, _insha'allah,_ " Joel agreed, writing out _WE ARE STILL HERE, COME IN_ in French and English before tearing the page out. There was no tape around, so he held it in place against the window-pane with a battery lantern and a statue of Our Lady of Knock on the sill. "Thanks for -- yeah, sorry, you probably didn't need to actually leave the house for this, did you? Thanks for letting me stress out at you in the middle of the night."

"It's all good," Faiza said as she gathered up her coat again. "I've been frustrated at how this mission has just been so much sitting around and watching. I feel better when I can really wade in and do something."

"And I feel better when she feels better," Will said. 

Joel saw them to the door and said goodnight, the street all enfolded in blackness except for tiny, dim islands of golden candlelight in scattered windows. The stars were dense and bright, crowded in between the constellations, the kind of stars he'd only ever seen at the cottage -- their rich-asshole cottage on the island in the serene St. Lawrence, where the city lights couldn't reach.

Things had been a lot easier once, and he'd been too sick to appreciate it. It wasn't fair.

He went upstairs and closed the bedroom door behind him, and then it caught up with him that Paul wasn't going to be following. _I'll be right up when Conan's over, you can shower first._ They didn't spend much time apart; when Joel went back to Ottawa for family visits he always brought Paul, for protection and because Paul missed having older people fuss over him. Joel's family, whatever their faults, were only too willing to fuss, and they loved him. Aunt Carmel always knitted socks for Paul out of undyed wool from black sheep, because synthetics and dyes often made him break out in weird rashes. There was a whole drawer full of hand-knit socks in the dresser now.

Joel set the candle down on the bedside table, the shadows jumping and making the room look haunted. He went over and sat down on Paul's bed, just to see what the room looked like from this angle. The stupid curtain divider on its Ikea rail, a pointless fig leaf. The pillow smelled like Paul, a scent Joel mostly knew in the humid form of bathroom steam -- soap and water and the indefinably foreign smell of _someone else_ , another body. Paul was sometimes a harsh critic of other people's perfumes and colognes (particularly on the metro) but he liked the ones that met his standards; he liked the comfort of things that smelled dark, soft, and resinous, like the sacristy at Saint-Sulpice. He was also dismissive of gender divisions, saying, "Anything with real quality and complexity is unisex." Joel had been sceptical of this claim until Paul had shown him a vial labelled _Sa Majesté la Rose_ , and it was true: in the bottle it was an intense burst of roses, definitely what Joel would have called a woman's perfume, and on Paul's wrist it was still roses, rich and green and spicy, full of a careful, muscular grace, and somehow completely right. 

Joel lay down on the bed that wasn't his and tried to tell himself he was being dramatic about nothing. _He's fine. He's fine._

* * *

"I'm bruised _everywhere_ ," Aurora was saying, wrapped up in a terrycloth robe and a blanket in Jean-Paul's room, her hair damp from the shower. "Or I will be, the marks just haven't shown up yet. Crashing through a window was easier than flying into that...forcefield. Whatever it was that girl did."

"We had lots of speed built up when we went through the window, we barely felt it." Jean-Paul was feeling the pain too, holding an icepack to his shoulder. Their power made them super-durable when they flew at high speeds, but they were more vulnerable when they had less momentum. "You're not supposed to use heat, you'll be swollen tomorrow."

"I don't care. I wanted a hot shower. I wish I could just stay in the bath for the next few days. Rig up a heated tank on wheels and I'll tool around the office in it." Aurora was picking at her cuticles, soft and pale from the shower. "Hey, it could be clear glass and I'll give everyone a show, who cares? The Montreal Mermaid. Sell tickets." After a moment, she added: "I don't like that it was Prawn. Or Paul either."

"We knew who we were going after."

"I'm just saying I don't like it. Prawn's just a normal dumb guy. He made a mistake and wrecked some stuff, big deal. So did Bridget when she caused that earthquake. And Paul's harmless. They just wanted him because they know they can't hold onto Joel, and that's...it's not _right_ , that's what bad guys do. Trying to get at somebody by hurting their boyfriend, that's for movie villains."

Jean-Paul switched the icepack to his other shoulder, which hurt almost as much. "Are they actually together or what?"

"They share a bedroom."

"Ohhh. The religion stuff threw off my gaydar."

"They're kind of weird and closety, but everyone at the house knows." Aurora had the remote for the Roku in hand but was just flipping through the menus absently, not paying attention to the TV screen. "What, does that make you more sympathetic? They're members of the tribe?" 

Jean-Paul started to protest and then decided he had nothing to apologise for. "Well, a little, yeah. It's normal to feel more sympathy for people when you have something in common with them. Other than being mutants."

"Okay, but you got my actual point, right?" said Aurora. "That shooting tranq darts at human beings feels like a thing that bad guys do?"

 _"Are we the baddies?"_ Jean-Paul quoted in English, from a Mitchell  & Webb sketch they'd watched together on Hulu one afternoon. "Well, we don't have skulls on our hats, so there's that. I don't know, is it that much worse than what regular cops do? Going to safety at Mile End wasn't exactly a trip to Disneyland either."

"And what, you think there's nothing wrong with how Mile End does things?"

"I didn't say that, just that I don't think -- look, they were absolutely breaking the law. Prawn caused massive damage. Paul might not be a dangerous mutant, but he helped orchestrate the whole operation. We would have arrested the others too if we could. If this mission felt wrong, then we're going to be squeamish about all of them."

"God, you're just wrapped up in being _consistent_ or something," said Aurora, putting some disdainful emphasis on the word. "This isn't a referendum on everything ever, but this, the actual thing we did tonight -- it felt a lot like doing something bad."

"You were the one saying 'cry me a river' when I told you that Hudson was after those guys. Because you didn't like cleaning the toilets."

"And you were the one saying it's creepy that the Department is watching them at all. What changed, did they put a chip in your head or something?" She was sitting above him on the bed while he was on the floor, and she reached out one bare foot from under her blanket to prod the back of his head with her toe. " _Tête-carré._ "

"Nothing changed, I still think it's creepy. Just..." He'd had to tell himself something in order to get the job done. That Prawn and the others had been irresponsible and had damaged a hell of a lot of property, and in the real world people got arrested for doing that, even if they did it without mutant powers. Prawn had done something wrong and Paul had helped, and that was all that Jean-Paul had to work with. "I wish we knew where we were sending Prawn and Paul. It's probably not Mile End. If I knew I'd drop a dime and call McCree. On a burner phone," he added, moving to sit on the bed with Aurora. "Like the stupid action movie this is. Because this is a democracy and people aren't supposed to get disappeared by the government here."

"Okay, _thank you._ We can still find out, I bet. Niko could get into the files -- and she knew Paul and Prawn too, she was at the house for a long time. You ever feel like this place was a mistake?" Aurora asked softly. "I'm not against the idea of it. But it doesn't seem like...I bet the Avengers don't feel like this."

"We're not exactly the Avengers." But Jean-Paul wanted to believe that they could be, that there was no reason a Canadian group of superheroes couldn't be just as strong, just as cool, just as worthwhile and valid as Americans. Just as good. He wanted to say _no, it's not a mistake, it's only hard the first time._ But he'd seen Hudson's files, and he'd felt the same swell of doubt that Aurora was feeling now. _Are we the baddies?_ "Sometimes I wonder, yeah. Sometimes I wish we didn't have to be the pioneers in this Department, that there'd been people ahead of us who had everything figured out. I don't believe in getting stuck on dreams and visions, but I wanted to think that somebody had a vision for this place. Something better than just 'find a way to make mutants behave.'"

"Maybe it'll have to be our vision," said Aurora.

* * *

Paul woke up in a very small, half-darkened room. Hospital bed with the head raised, cinderblock walls, fluorescent lights shining murkily through a layer of shatterproof glass. Four-point restraints on the bed, fantastic, although at least he wasn't buckled into them. No more blindfold. No sign of Prawn. No clues about the location, not even a laundry service stamp on the sheets. His coat was gone again.

He was too bleary to gather clues anyway. A feeling of surveillance, somehow, even though he couldn't see where a camera might be hidden. Not that the government needed cameras anymore, now that they had mutants working for them. He remembered doing laundry in the basement one day and feeling a strange prickle of _observance_ , as if he wasn't alone, and he had glanced up to see a small black cat with yellow eyes peering through the high window. A stray city cat, caught in the window well and having trouble getting the momentum to leap out again. Relieved ( _this time I'm_ not _crazy!_ ) and moved, Paul had set down the laundry hamper and gone outside to pull the cat free, where it fled from him without gratitude. 

The door opened and a woman came in. She was wearing a labcoat, and for a second Paul dared to hope that he was actually in a hospital. She was nondescript, with short greying brown hair and glasses, a file under one arm. "Right, so you're new, from...Quebec," she said, opening the folder and reading from the chart. "You speak English?"

"Yeah," Paul said, figuring that condescending questions were the least of his problems. "Where is this?"

"You're at the National Mutant Research Centre. Can I ask you some--"

Nope. "I want a lawyer."

"That's not possible. I'm Dr. Hines, and I'll be overseeing the team who'll be managing you. Let's just run through the basic info here so--"

Paul interrupted again. "What do you mean, I can't have a lawyer? I _have_ been arrested, right? That's what happened?" He hadn't been formally told the charge, but he didn't feel like playing dumb about that one when he had in fact committed a couple of crimes. "Why am I talking to a doctor, when did I consent to medical treatment?"

Dr. Hines shrugged and read from the file. "You've been designated as a mutant dangerous to the public following a disturbance in Repentigny, Quebec," she said. "Dangerous mutants may be held for treatment where possible, so I guess that's what happened."

"Are you kidding me? I'm not dangerous -- is that even my file?" _Yeah, that's what this is, mistaken identity. Sure._ "What the hell is 'treatment' supposed to mean?"

"For mutants with low-functioning mutations, we attempt to resolve their issues and make them better able to contribute to society," said Dr. Hines. "Usually we're very successful, great track record. Listen, don't think of this place as a prison, okay? We're not trying to punish you. We want to help you reach your full potential."

"Well, that's great, but I still do not consent to this," Paul said, hoping now that this was all being recorded somewhere, that somebody in security would have a crisis of conscience and leak it all online. "And I'm not low-functioning."

"Are you currently employed?"

"Yeah."

"What's your income?"

Paul stumbled over this question, as he usually did, because he didn't have an income or a real job per se. For everything besides necessities, he and Joel shared a joint account, a modest entertainment budget, and neither of them cared to divvy it up more than that. Paul certainly worked, and he was proud of that, but according to Revenue Canada his income was zero. Joel had said something about it once, _maybe I should set things up so you have a salary_ , but Paul hadn't wanted to bother with the paperwork. "That's none of your business."

"You never wanted to work outside the home?" said Dr. Hines. "Have some independence?"

"I like what I do. If I wanted to get another job I would've done it, but what for? I have meaningful work with people I like, in a comfortable environment. You don't get that working for Tim Horton's."

She tilted her head. "You don't have other ambitions? What did you want to do when you were a kid, what'd you say when people asked what you were going to be when you grew up?"

"Is this what _you_ wanted to be?" Paul shot back. 

It didn't faze her. "Yes, I always wanted to be a scientist, and when I first learned about mutants I knew I wanted to work with them. Sometimes it's been very difficult," she said, a bit of brittle darkness coming into her voice, but she brushed it aside. She had a remarkably linear smell, very little development or subtlety to it: just a bland, workaday scientific interest and a jaded determination to see a job through. "Worth it, though. We really make a difference here."

"Look, my mutation had nothing to do with what happened at Repentigny," Paul said, changing tacks. "That's right there in my file, I literally can't hurt other people with my abilities. I can't even defend myself if someone tries to hurt me. And not that it's any of your business, but I function just fine. My diet's under control, my meds are working, and I'm happy. But even if that weren't true, that still wouldn't give you the right to do medical stuff to me without my permission. If I'm under arrest then I want a lawyer, and if not then I want to go home."

"You're appealing to the law, but I'm afraid it isn't on your side," said Dr. Hines. "Because you're under Dangerous Mutant status according to the Mutants and Public Order Act, we are not required to release you until treatment is complete, and we don't have to allow legal counsel onto the premises. This facility is a classified location."

"Then I want to notify my partner," said Paul, desperate to get any kind of concession out of her, desperate not to disappear into this place. "Even if I can't say where I am, I want to let him know--"

"We don't allow external communications from patients. Sorry."

"Is Prawn -- is my friend here, the one who came with me? Francis Dudley?"

"Francis Dudley is a patient here as well, yes. We'll allow you some time later to talk if everything else is progressing according to the treatment plan." She flipped the file folder closed again.

"Wait--" It was all beginning to get sickeningly real, and he could tell that he wasn't just going to wake up in Mile End or the Allan psych hospital at home. _Just a nightmare, just some stray paranoia, it's fine._ Paul's voice cracked. "You haven't even told me what you're going to do to me."

Dr. Hines shrugged. "You used up a lot of time arguing. We've studied your history and we think it's likely that your physical mutations were never fully expressed, probably due to malnutrition during adolescence. That might also extend to the empathic ability too, since it's so dependent on biochemistry rather than a conventional psionic power. We're going to trigger your X-gene again to see if we can get it to develop fully."

That was certainly alarming enough, but Paul had been expecting something along the lines of a frontal lobotomy, and he didn't see understand the motive for this. "Why?"

"Well, we think the results might be enlightening. It's not ordinarily something we'd go out of our way to study, but since you're here, it's worth exploring. Our mission is to make you better. Stronger. Stronger Canadians for a stronger Canada. You're displaying some signs of distress so I'm going to send someone in to sedate you again," said Dr. Hines, going to the door. "Needless to say, you're always being monitored so don't get violent with the staff. This is a high-security facility."

"Yeah, no kidding," Paul said, and watched as she left without saying goodbye, without even the ironic _have a nice day_ that the safety centre employees always used. The door clicked shut and locked.

 _Don't panic. Yet._ It was possible that these people were underestimating Prawn, and that he'd be able to bust a way out. Otherwise Paul was counting on Joel, who was probably losing his mind. Maybe the Brits would help, maybe even the X-Men, maybe both. That was a nice thought. International rescue attempt for a couple of nobodies. _Is it maybe a little unrealistic that the guy who can't even hold up a conversation at a party is going to talk a superhero team into rescuing you?_

Well, it probably was, but Paul had to hold onto something. They knew a lot of people, had done a lot of favours for mutants in the city. Joel would squeeze every source he had, _please let that be true_ , and somebody would come. This was just another Neurocherche.

The tech who came in next had a strange smell to her, an empty calm that was humming and thrumming like super-heated metal and motor oil. Plugged in and vacant. If she had emotions beyond that facade of buzzing flatness, he couldn't detect them. She forced his wrists and ankles into the restraints with quietly unstoppable strength, and Paul complied in the interest of not getting any bones broken. The tech injected him with more of the cold silver sedative and graced him with some comforting words, as if that was supposed to help. "Relax. Sleep. You have nothing to fear."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't seen it, the referenced sketch: ["Are we the baddies?"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VImnpErdDzA)


	13. Hannibal at Cannae

_We sail over a vast expanse, ever uncertain, ever drifting, hurried from_  
_one to the other goal. If we think to attach ourselves firmly to any point,_  
_it totters and fails us; if we follow, it eludes our grasp, and flies from us,_  
_vanishing for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, yet_  
_always the most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find a_  
_steadfast place and an ultimate fixed basis whereon we may build a tower_  
_to reach the infinite. But our whole foundation breaks up, and earth opens_  
_to the abysses._  
  
— Blaise Pascal, _Pensées_

The power was back on in the morning, when Joel woke up in Paul's bed. Red blinking **12:00** on the clock in his line of sight. He'd fallen asleep with his clothes still on -- nope, he'd had a seizure in his sleep, that was the rotten taste of blood in his mouth and the aching muscles, the headache. A dark spot of blood-streaked drool on Paul's pillow. He was lucky he hadn't rolled over and smothered himself in it. Usually after a nocturnal seizure he woke up to find Paul awake on the other side of the room, reading or playing games on his laptop, quietly keeping a lookout to make sure Joel was still breathing. 

His memory was just fine, though; nocturnal seizures didn't seem to mess with his brain as much, except to make him exhausted. It would have been nice to have a second or two of disorientation to forget about the ten-storey pile of shit he had to shovel, but no such luck.

Joel stumbled up to the bathroom, where he took an Aleve with a glass of water and then brushed his teeth and took the rest of his meds. He didn't shower, just in case his brain was planning to short out again, but changed his clothes and picked up his phone, thumbing through his contacts to call the Professor. _The true secret to beating social anxiety: get so desperate for help that you don't mind dialling the phone._

He closed his eyes as he listened to the rings, slumping over to lean his head on the wall, still sitting on Paul's bed. When Dr. Xavier picked up he said, "Hi -- um, it's Joel, we're having some trouble up here."

"So it would seem," came Dr. Xavier's voice, welcome and familiar. "The news mentioned mutant involvement in a power outage in Quebec, so I wondered about your people there."

"It got on the American news?"

"Not on the likes of CNN, or not I saw. But mutant bloggers linked to the CBC story, and Hank noticed it, so he sent it to me. I'm sure the CBC had less than half of the truth, so why don't you tell me what really happened?"

"Oh boy. Okay." Joel turned the pillow over and lay down again, telling the story with his eyes still closed. Just a few more minutes until the Aleve kicked in. No more than fifteen. He could hack it. The story felt jagged and awkward, ungainly, a stupid flightless ostrich of a story, full of naivety and bad ideas. Full of _we should have known better, but_ and _somehow_ and _we didn't realise._ "So I have twelve girls here at the house, which is about six more than I can really house comfortably--"

"Well, of course we'll come up and pick up any who are willing to come to Westchester," Dr. Xavier said. "If you forward those patient intake records you have on the USB drive -- ask the girls first, naturally -- we'll take care of the legwork involved in calling parents and guardians. You must have your hands full."

"God, yes, we do. Thank you." The kindness of it made Joel's chest ache, help offered before he could even ask. "I'll email them as soon as I'm off the phone. Thanks so much, really, that's a big load off."

"Not at all, we're always happy to help mutant children in need. And I have a well-known soft spot for young telepaths locked up in institutions, as Jean will attest," Dr. Xavier added wryly. "Are you able to bail your friends out, the ones who were arrested?"

"No." Joel hadn't told that arm of the story with enough detail, entangled with talking about the telepaths. "We don't know where they took Paul and Prawn. Department H just said _in custody_ , but they weren't in any of the likely safety centres. I guess it's possible that the ones in Charlemagne's jurisdiction were full and they got sent somewhere else, but we've called dozens of them by now. Usually if a centre's full they'll tell you when you call, they'll say 'so-and-so appeared here but was directed on to Île-aux-Vaches' or whatever." Île-aux-Vaches had been a flat, sleepy little island of woods and parkland in the river just north of Laval, but the government had built a high-security mutant holding centre there two years ago, driving down the local property values and pissing off both mutants and baseline humans, for different reasons. "Ling said it's likely they went to an airstrip up in the country, and the MI13 guys said they found out about something called the Weapon Plus program--"

"I beg your pardon?" Dr. Xavier interrupted.

"Yeah, um, they said...what the fuck did they say," Joel muttered, sitting up again and rubbing his face to get his thoughts lined up again. "Neurocherche was sending patients there -- and taking them back after, sometimes -- and I guess the official story is that they were going to a National Mutant Research Centre. Or some combination of those words. But the Brits say that place doesn't really exist, it's just a front for Weapon Plus. Which they think is some government lab--"

"I'm familiar with the Weapon Plus program," said Dr. Xavier. It was quiet. "I had thought it was...well. Unfortunately, evil men and their ideas often survive like cockroaches when they should have been wiped out long ago. The last information I had about them placed them in Alberta," he said, and Joel heard the background hum of the motorised wheelchair over the phone. A shuffle, a few taps on a keyboard. "Connected with...the Department of Energy and Natural Resources, this says."

That sounded off to Joel, although he didn't quite trust his memory. "I'm pretty sure that's, um, maybe out of date."

"Is it?"

"Yeah, just 'cause...well, Energy and Natural Resources are separate portfolios. I think maybe they were one department in like, the '80s? Trudeau years, I read about it. And I know the federal Minister of Natural Resources, she used to be, um, the -- shit, I do know this -- my dad, when he was the Justice Minister she was the Opposition critic, and now she's been shuffled to Natural Resources in the Tory cabinet. Marilyn Valiquette, my dad used to talk about her like she was Moriarty." Joel smiled slightly, a brief happy memory that burned through like celluloid. "I don't have Google in front of me so I could be wrong, but..."

"No, I expect you're right," said Dr. Xavier. "Weapon Plus seems to operate with the government's blessing, but they're surrounded by so many false fronts and red herrings -- I doubt there are very many in your government who know of its existence. Clearly this Department H does, though."

"It's still _possible_ they didn't take Paul and Prawn there," Joel said reluctantly. He kept saying that to everyone, and it was less and less convincing as the hours went by.

"But you fear it's not that simple."

"I'm afraid they'd want to use Paul and Prawn as leverage, which -- God, does that sound crazy? I'm sounding crazy, right?"

"I wish it were an unbelievable thing to say," Dr. Xavier said. "You might certainly be mistaken, and I hope that you are, but I don't think it's an outrageous notion to think the government is interested in...getting what they want from you. They've been showing that they are, through their behaviour. And they have taken -- illegally abducted, is the correct phrase -- mutants in the past. I don't think you sound irrational." He paused. "How _are_ you holding up, though?"

"Uh, good question." Joel sat up slowly, trying not to move his head too much, but the headache was beginning to die down. "I went to bed like a good patient but I had a seizure anyway while I was asleep, so everything hurts."

"Like a good patient, quite. It's very difficult," said the Professor. "Being involved in direct action like this when physically you can't depend upon yourself."

Joel put it together and flushed with embarrassment. "Sorry, yeah -- sorry, Professor, I know it's worse for you--"

Dr. Xavier stopped him. "I wasn't comparing the two, and you needn't either. I could just as easily argue that you have it worse, because my own disability is at least a very predictable one, and it only affects my mobility and not my memory or mental alertness. All a matter of perspective, wouldn't you say? But it's not a competition. Empathy is a renewable resource, and I do empathise; as I said, it's difficult to be at the mercy of your body when time is of the essence and your friends are in trouble."

"It really is," Joel murmured. "I hate this, I hate myself for getting Paul involved, and if I hadn't done it then I'd hate myself for leaving the girls at Neurocherche, so there's no way to win."

"You did the right thing. Perhaps it could have gone better, but your intentions were good, and you did help twelve young women free themselves. Sometimes plans go wrong. A leader learns from it and moves forward."

" _No,_ no, no." Joel got up left the bedroom, phone still in hand as he took the stairs carefully down to the second floor. "That's not my goal, here, I'm not a leader of anything."

"Well, I'm afraid you already are, _de facto,_ " said Dr. Xavier. "I understand that you wanted the power structure at your house to be different, but it's very hard to get other people thinking that way. In a crisis they'll look to whoever seems to have authority, or whoever has ideas or energy or whatever else. Like it or not, it's your house and they're looking to you."

"Rally 'round the flag, sure. This isn't false modesty or low self-esteem or anything, I'm the worst person they could pick to follow."

Dr. Xavier made a small, sceptical _hm_ at that. "You have a very conflicted relationship with power, actually, but we don't have time to tease that apart at the moment. Nevertheless, perhaps for now you can focus on trying to be the best leader you can. We'll talk more very soon -- the X-Men should be there with the jet by the end of today."

"Really?" Joel had forgotten how quickly things moved at the school. "Wow. Thank you, I mean, that's really fast. Americans get stuff done, eh?"

"'Eh,'" the Professor repeated fondly, a smile in his voice. "Yes, we do, and yes, we'll be there. Go take care of your children, Joel."

* * *

Joel and Grace finished calling the safety centres in the metro area that morning, and it became official: Paul and Prawn weren't anywhere in Montreal. So much for that. The _fonctionnaires_ at the safety centres didn't lie, because they were bureaucrats and it took a lot of organisation to get them to all tell the same lie. You could count on them to say _he's here_ or _we don't have a record_ , and they'd been that way for years. Like demons trapped in a chalk triangle by a medieval sorcerer, they had to tell the truth if you asked, because that was department policy and their jobs were on the line.

Joel's minimal energy reserves tapped out at noon and he passed out on the couch in the back sitting room, in a thick, sticky sleep that he kept trying to fight, and failed, while Ling and Kathleen sat on the other sofa together with a stack of magazines. They'd been trailing him all day and didn't seem to want to go far. 

When he woke up, it was nearly five o'clock, and he wished he could punch himself in the face. _Yeah, waste an entire day, good job. Nobody's counting on you or anything._ He got up and listened for a moment to the quiet hum in the house, the _tock-tock-tock_ of a knife on a cutting board in the kitchen as Arlette and Ox took their turn starting dinner, the creaks of floorboards from upstairs, the TV in the other room. A house full of people Joel didn't know very well, or at all, but they were his. His guests, his responsibility.

In the front hall he heard Kathleen's voice behind him. "Where are you going?"

"Just around the corner, I'm going to Mass," he said, putting his shoes on and feeling through the overstuffed closet for his coat. "It's like twenty minutes, I'll be back soon. Is that okay?"

She frowned, as if that were a weird question for him to be asking her -- maybe it was. "You're the only one I really know here," she said. "And your brain feels weird today."

"Oh." That made sense in retrospect; Joel was bad at anticipating this kind of thing. He'd been impressed by how strong the girls were but of course they'd be feeling vulnerable right about now. "Yeah, it does, but I'm not gonna die on you or anything. I mean you can come with if you want, just it's pretty boring."

"No, we're good," said Kathleen, as expected. "It's short, yeah, you'll come back..."

"If anything happens just go to the kitchen and stick with Ox and Arlette, okay? The really big guy and the super-thin Black girl with the long straight hair." Grace and Mars were around too, but he wasn't sure where, and the kitchen was easiest to get to. 

That seemed to set Kathleen at ease. A strategy. "Okay," she said, turning back down the hall. "Don't make dinner late."

"I won't. Eat without me if you want, I don't care." Joel put his coat on and walked through the closed door, not bothering with the locks.

Daily Mass at Saint-Sulpice was definitely boring, as he'd said, but he slumped in his pew like a seal resting on a beach, tired of swimming and fighting the waves, regaining its strength. There were five people in the church, including the priest, and that was actually a healthy number for the middle of the week. Joel zoned out completely through most of the liturgy, just making the responses on autopilot, but he needed to be here. He wasn't always sure what it was he would get from coming, and sometimes the answer was _nothing much_ , but it was like sleep: it wasn't the good stuff every night, but he still had to try on a regular schedule or he'd fall apart.

He received and knelt back down with the Host melting on his tongue, and he thought about where Paul might be right now -- in Alberta, maybe, hundreds of miles away. Maybe asleep, maybe awake, in pain, lost, cold, hungry, lonely, or scared. _I should be worrying about Prawn too, just as hard, just as much. But I'm selfish._

There was no music at daily Mass, and the priest just pronounced the dismissal and then started the Rosary. Joel didn't feel like staying around for that, so he got up and left the nave, only to see a very familiar figure in a wheelchair waiting in the vestibule. "Professor, what're you -- how'd you get up here so fast?"

"Americans get stuff done," said the Professor with a smile, reaching out for Joel's hand. "We landed in the city not long ago; Scott is looking for a better parking spot, as it were. We don't want to get a ticket for idling the Blackbird in Jeanne Mance Park."

"You landed in _Jeanne-Mance?_ " 

"It had the space. But at your house -- with its very intimidating front steps -- they told me you were here."

"God, yeah, sorry. The ramp's at the rear entrance, and it's fine inside, all the doorways are wide enough..."

"Then we'll be fine. Why don't we go back to the house and talk to the girls? It's good to see you in person again," said Dr. Xavier. "I'm sorry that I won't have a chance to meet Paul this time."

"Yeah," Joel said, pressing the button by the church doors to make them open with a slow, pneumatic rush. "Me too, yeah."

"There will be other opportunities, Joel," the Professor said quietly. "We have no reason yet to think the worst."

"No, I know." Back in the Professor's office, five years ago, Joel would have left it at that and waited to be questioned further, waiting for proof that anyone else wanted to hear from him. He hadn't completely got over that, and he still felt awkward and too loud when he started conversations with people, like a badly tuned radio full of static. "I think it's more just...I'm not really at my best when Paul's not here. I was thinking about the stuff you were saying about trying to be a leader, and like, me and Paul together sort of add up into an okay leader, I think, but not individually."

"I understand. When you're very compatible with someone, sometimes it does feel like having access to new gifts and capabilities. And when they're gone, you can feel...diminished." Dr. Xavier rubbed his thumb absently over the controls of his chair as they headed for the sidewalk. "Having lost not only the person who left, but the person the two of you were together."

That made Joel a little curious, but he didn't feel like it was polite to ask: _who did you know that way, and why did they leave?_

"It's not rude to wonder about it," the Professor said, responding to the unspoken thought. "There are more and less tactful ways to ask, but it's not wrong to have questions about other people. But it is a rather long story for a short walk. The short version is that his name was Erik, and the two of us were mutants at a time when mutants were far more uncommon than they are now, and ultimately we disagreed on too much to stay together. Politically, philosophically, ethically. And I miss him very much. I miss who we were together."

Joel had faded out a bit; the ploughed part of the sidewalk was narrow, just barely enough for the Professor's chair, and he was drifting along beside it through the knee-deep snow, not feeling it. The Professor couldn't read his thoughts while he was intangible, and thus couldn't have answered those questions: _was it like that, was it what it sounds like, did you love him?_ But Joel thought he understood the implication well enough without an absolute outside confirmation. "Yeah," he said finally. "I miss Paul like that."

They went around to the rear entrance of the house, where they found Dr. Grey and Mr. Summers standing around the back gate, chatting with Arlette and Ox while another man Joel didn't recognise was leaning against the fence with a cigar.

"I suppose you must have found someplace to park?" said Dr. Xavier to Mr. Summers. "Not, I hope, anywhere conspicuous?"

"Kid picked the roof of a shopping mall," said the stranger. He had long, scruffy sideboards and thick dark hair, wild and wickedly handsome, and he was the only one dressed for the weather with a proper coat on. "Jeannie has everyone in security convinced there's nothing to see up there, but you know. Google Earth, always taking pics."

"It's fine," said Mr. Summers, a little testily. "It's there for a couple of hours max, and the building's tall enough you can't see the Blackbird from street level."

"I'm sure it is fine. Joel, this is our associate Logan -- I don't think your paths ever crossed at the school. He's from this country too, I believe."

"I believe too," Logan said, the sarcasm directed nowhere in particular, but he took a hand out of his pocket and offered it to Joel. A crushing handshake, although Joel didn't think it was on purpose. "I don't come this way too much, mostly out West. Might as well be a different country."

"We've all got windchill and Tim's to keep us together, I guess," Joel said, and opened the door to let everybody inside. "Everything's okay in here, right? Nobody got spooked by the strangers?"

"I told the girls everything was fine," Arlette said airily. 

"If you two are out here, who's cooking?"

"We put it on hold for a minute."

" _Ben, mais faut se grouiller_ and we're all gonna try to remember to stick with English, right?" Joel said as he locked up behind them, taking coats to hang them in the back closet. "I'm actually one of the worst offenders here, sorry."

"I think Scott and Logan are the only ones who'll get lost," Dr. Grey said with a wink. "The Professor speaks very elegant Parisian French, and I can pick up languages from people temporarily -- enough to understand, anyway. My mouth can't always keep up, so I can entertain everybody by trying to pronounce things. Can we help with cooking or would we just be in the way?"

"No, I like company!" said Arlette. "Everyone in the kitchen!"

"Not quite everyone," the Professor said. "If we can get the girls together I'd like to speak with them a bit before dinner. We can't really stay all evening, much as we would like to, since our jet is parked in a 'don't even think about it' zone."

There was a busy, burbling chaos everywhere in the house, which was overstuffed with people even though it was missing two very important ones, and while the girls from Neurocherche trickled down from upstairs to meet the Professor, the Brits showed up at the door as well, and Faiza completely lost her cool when she saw that the X-Men were there in the flesh. She insisted on taking a selfie with Dr. Xavier, and then with Dr. Grey and Mr. Summers too, and then one with Logan even though she didn't know much about him (she didn't want him to feel left out). Arlette wasn't very good at staying on-task when things were busy, so Joel took over in the kitchen with Ox, while everybody else gathered around the table and everyone talked at once. 

It looked a lot like a Catholic Worker house was supposed to look, freaks and misfits all sitting together, guests under one roof, lively and loud. But it wasn't right because Prawn and Paul weren't here, and no amount of _they will be_ could set Joel at ease. Not yet.

* * *

Niko hadn't been completely, 100% on board with breaking into secured files on the Alpha Flight system. "I don't want to get in trouble, guys, I want them to trust me..." Part of Aurora ( _that part, the ugly dowdy loser part that nobody would ever like_ ) understood and shared her worries, but she steamrolled over those impulses and bullied Niko into going along.

Niko's family were from Finland, and they'd moved to Canada so that her dad could work for a computer company in Ottawa when she was five. She had an accent that was more marked in French than in English, a sloping roundness to her vowels, and she was ferociously pale, with freckles and nearly-invisible brows and lashes. She wore her wheat-coloured hair in twin braids, incongruous when she was otherwise a bit of a goth in her civvies. She hadn't lived on the streets long; after semi-accidentally breaking into a government database as a teenager, she'd gotten a menacing phonecall from the RCMP and she'd panicked, leaving home and rushing for the first mutant shelter she could find. 

That was all Aurora needed to know to get her way. "You were scared and you needed help, and those people took you in. They let you live there for _two years_ , right at their side, and now you don't want to help them because of a job you've had for two months--"

Sure enough, Niko folded. "Okay, okay, I don't need a big guilt trip. I liked Paul and Prawn too -- I mean I do like them, it's not like they're dead or anything. I hope."

"We're not talking like that," Jean-Paul said, because then he was going to be the one spun up in guilty thoughts. _You tackled them to the ground and tranquilised them like they were bears wandering out of Algonquin Park, and now for all you know they might be dead._ Cops were notoriously lax about making sure mutants didn't die in custody, and that was with regular arrests on the street. "Let's just go."

"Go where?" said Niko. "I don't have to be _in_ the lab to get in the system. Here's close enough, and there's more privacy. I'll send what I find to your printer, okay?" she said to Aurora, blinking as the computer on the desk woke from sleep and its drives began to spin. "You have ink in there, right?"

"Yeah, there's a new cartridge," Aurora said, a little put off that they weren't going to get to sneak around like spies. "I guess I can unbutton my jeans and crack a beer open."

"All you care about is drama."

"Well, what should I care about? Please tell me. Everybody shut up, Jean-Paul Beaubier is about to grace us all with some wise words about life--"

"Could you _actually_ shut up?" said Niko, sitting at Aurora's desk with her fingers resting lightly on the keys, as if they were the planchette on a Ouija board. "I'm trying to concentrate."

Jean-Paul flopped over on Aurora's bed and let his arms hang over the end, like a really hungover Superman. He was still aching from the night before, and Hudson hadn't said anything about giving the team a few days to recover. Just "take it easy today, gang." They were going to be back in Combat Centrale in the morning, probably, where they'd flunk all the training exercises because they were still bruised and sprained all over. _Good for morale, right?_

Fuck this place. He wanted to be doing something _like_ this, working with a team to stop bad things from happening. That sounded good. But everyone on Alpha Flight was either suffocating under the government controls or they were enjoying the petty power they had. Jean-Paul didn't want to leave, exactly -- where was he going to go? Home, where his adoptive parents didn't really love the idea of him hanging around with his biological sister? Home, where he'd have to pretend to be normal? His parents didn't hate mutants, exactly, but they didn't understand why mutants couldn't just _lead normal lives_ , as they always said. Live without using their powers, without startling anyone else, without having different experiences. Live without living.

What was option three? Joel McCree's weird little band of religious freaks and anarchists? Jean-Paul didn't have to give any serious thought to that idea. He wasn't the type to live anyplace that had more than three images of the Virgin Mary on a single floor. Like wraparound shades or booty shorts, it just wasn't a good look on him.

_Maybe we'll all just run away,_ he thought. The twins, Niko, probably Bridget, maybe even Walt, who was really okay once you got to know him. Maybe there were other mutants in Beta Flight or one of the other groups. Heather and Jim Hudson were the ones who didn't really understand, but maybe they'd be relieved to start over with new blood.

Niko interrupted this reverie. "Hey, um -- hmm. I think I found what we're looking for. Let's see...queue that, and then this stuff...and -- oh boy..."

"What, what is it?" said Aurora, restless when all she could do was wait. 

"I found another file, some other guy we used to know at the house. And here too. I think Kyle was already gone when you guys got here, right?"

Aurora sat up straighter. "I want to see his file."

"Okay, I'm queueing that too. Get some more paper, this is gonna be long--"

They were interrupted by a brief, perfunctory knock, and the door opened. Heather McNeil was there, fussing with a brace on her right elbow, which she'd sprained the night before. "Guys, what are you getting into over here?" she said wearily.

"Nothing," Aurora said.

"Yeah, pretty sure it's something. Niko, I hate to reveal a magician's secrets here, but we know when you're in the system. The lights in the lab are programmed to turn on when the machines do."

Niko sagged back in the desk chair, and the printer made an angry little noise in sympathy with her before going on stubbornly with its print job. " _Voi kyrpä_."

"Now we have to think of something different to keep you out, but c'mon, you must have known we'd have _something_ in place, right?" said Heather. "You think we'd have a technopath on the team and no plans for keeping our files secure? What were you guys after, anyway?" When no one answered, she closed the door behind her. "Just level with me, would you? I'm not necessarily gonna bring in Jim or Clarke if it's none of their business."

The three of them glanced at each other, and Jean-Paul was the one who spoke up, even though it had been Aurora's idea. Sort of. Well, both of theirs. "We wanted to know where Prawn and Paul Laliberté are being held. It's not right that it's some big secret. When a normal human breaks the law, even if they murder someone, their families know where they're being held. What the charges are, whether there's bail or not, whatever."

"Are you kidding me?" said Heather. "That location's classified for a reason, and the reason is to keep people like McCree and his friends from running in to disrupt everything. They attacked Neurocherche for _nothing_ , for strangers. What makes you think they'll be peaceful when it's people they actually like?"

"Because they didn't _attack_ Neurocherche," Aurora snapped. "Prawn had an accident, that's all. Or have we all just decided to forget that Bridget ripped up a street and that Walt's the reason you have a brace on your arm now? Mutants make mistakes. Prawn wouldn't hurt anybody. If you're just mad that he wrecked somebody's research--"

"This isn't about me or my feelings. I'm not mad at anyone, and you getting mad at me isn't going to help anything either."

"We're not mad at you," Jean-Paul said, and as usual it came out sounding disdainful and arrogant when he'd been going for something more like jolly dismissiveness. _Us, mad? Never! What, me worry?_ "We just think that if they committed a crime, you should treat them like criminals. Like, with rights. Taking people and making it some kind of big secret is what people do in dictatorships, and we aren't...we aren't going to participate in that."

Heather had a pained expression, and she sat down on the edge of the bed and awkwardly took the elastic off her ponytail with one hand, letting her red hair loose. "Guys. For real. I don't want to make this a big deal and have to get into discussing discipline issues and blah blah blah. And this was mission one. There's gonna be a lot of hard decisions coming up ahead."

"Then maybe we don't want to stay on past the end of our training period," Aurora said quietly.

"Well, maybe you don't. That's up to you. We're not gonna lock you up, even if this is a quote-unquote dictatorship," Heather said. "Look, if it helps, I agree with you about this one. There's no love lost between me and McCree -- I thought he was a good kid at first, but frankly he's acting like a self-righteous nutjob. You remember, just as they were leaving, he looked me in the eye and said _you can't stop me_ , and I thought...you know? Is this chapter one in the story of how Alpha Flight accidentally created a supervillain?"

Niko couldn't hold back a snicker at that, and it set Aurora off too. "You're worried about Joel? Really?"

"Yeah, really," Heather said, not amused. "Because he's right, we can't stop him. Think about all the places that you really hope nobody ever breaks into. Think about doors that can never be locked, not when it matters. Think about any private moment being up for grabs if he's trying to blackmail you. You're gonna tell me you know him so well and he wouldn't do any of that, because he's such a good guy. All I can say is he better be. He better be exactly as neurotic and unambitious and shy as his file says, because if he wanted to terrorise this country he sure could. And that goes double for Prawn."

"All right, so Prawn deserves it, and you'd lock Joel up if you could but you can't," said Jean-Paul. "What's your rationale for doing that to Paul? He's not dangerous and he's easy to control. Were you just trying to make sure _something_ bad happens to Joel even though you can't arrest him? Hurt his boyfriend? Because if you're that worried about keeping him from going full Magneto or whatever, maybe you shouldn't give him some impressive injustice to get worked up over."

Heather was silent for a few moments, and then she said, "It wasn't quite that blatant, but yes, we were hoping that we could sweep as many of the crew from that house as possible even if we couldn't get him. Just to hammer it home that actions have consequences, especially to other people."

"Well -- Jesus, you're not his mom, okay?" Jean-Paul was somehow more appalled by this explanation. Maybe just because it implied that there were no set laws or rights for mutants, just a bunch of flatscans improvising their way through. "You can't arrest and confine people to teach some other guy a fucking lesson! And you can't keep it a secret, like they got sent off to the Gulag. That's unacceptable in a free society and listen, it's fucking stupid too. If you give McCree a legal avenue to get his friends out, he'll take it. When he wanted to get Prawn and me out of safety last time, he walked in the front door and paid the bail."

"All _right_ , fine, you guys made your point," said Heather, putting her hair back in the ponytail. "Here's the deal. You can notify him of where they are, but that is it. No more involvement. Jim and I will handle the fallout, because this is a team and we take responsibility for each other. And you make our jobs easier by lying real low. Oh, and Niko? Next time I catch you snooping in the secured system, it's your ass. You've been warned."

"Yes, ma'am," Niko said, chastened, her thin skin blushing tomato-red.

When Heather was gone, Aurora closed the door and let out a long breath, fanning a strand of hair over her forehead. "Je- _sus._ "

"You got that right," said Niko, bundling up the printouts angrily. "I feel so stupid, _so_ stupid, I didn't even notice that extra wiring in the computer lab -- I wasn't looking at analog--"

"Hey, we're sorry," said Jean-Paul. "We didn't mean to get you in trouble -- leave the pages?"

"Here." Niko dropped the pages at Aurora's feet in a white drift. "I'm going back to bed until they drag us out for training. Fuck this."

Niko stormed out and slammed the door, and Jean-Paul sat down with Aurora to look at the pile of papers. "I guess we'll apologise in a more sincere voice later," he said.

"I didn't exactly enjoy getting yelled at either," said Aurora. "Prawn owes me big when he gets out. So does Paul, but at least Prawn's hetero enough to deliver."

"Ha ha, no, this is not a safe space to talk about what you want Prawn to do to you. I don't want to hear it," Jean-Paul said, sorting through the papers until he found one that showed a map. A dot was labelled as **Weapon Plus**. "I guess this is the one? Where's your phone? I'm just going to call him now. Get it over with in case I die in my sleep, I can go straight to heaven."

Aurora just said _hm_ and passed him her phone without looking, absorbed in the pages she was looking at.

Jean-Paul held the phone back in her direction and she pressed her thumb to the button to unlock it, still not looking up from the files. He went through the list of contacts, which Aurora had labelled with more commentary than specificity. _Naggy guy with A+ tongue technique_ and _PRAWN'S LATEST BURNER (use this one)_ and _don't call this asshole no matter how drunk_ and two numbers that were respectively labelled _MORRISSEY_ and _BOBBY KENNEDY_. "Okay, I can't decode this, which one of these is the house?"

Aurora's attention returned and she took the phone back, looking at the contact list, and she cackled at the names. "Morrissey, God, when did I write that? I think that's Paul's, anyway. Joel's is Bobby Kennedy."

"I don't get it."

"There's nothing to get. Rich Irish-Catholic politico martyr type with big teeth. Picture him when he's forty and tell me I'm wrong."

It was actually pretty apt, but Jean-Paul rolled his eyes and dialled the number. After a few rings he got a befuddled-sounding, _"Allô?"_

"This is Joel McCree's phone, right? This is Jean-Paul Beaubier calling. --Don't hang up," he added, remembering that his voice might not be terribly welcome right now.

A pause. "I wasn't planning on hanging up. What's going on?"

Jean-Paul drew in a breath and took the plunge. "Um, my sister and I -- and Niko -- we weren't...we weren't too happy about how things went at Neurocherche. That was fucked up." He wasn't going to apologise unless someone insisted on it, because the order hadn't been his idea. But he could admit that it was fucked up. "We dug in the files and we found out where Prawn and your partner are. We thought you deserve to know."

"Uh, wow. Okay." There was a clatter in the background, probably people tidying up after dinner. "Could you hold on a second?"

"Sure."

A few muffled voices in English, the click of a door. "Sorry, I just had to get out of the kitchen for a second," Joel said. He sounded tired. "Noisy in there. I really hate to be a hardass about this, but can you say more about why we should trust your information? You two are still with the Department."

"Yeah, we are, and you should trust us because we risked our jobs to find this out," Jean-Paul said, rapidly losing patience. Not that he ever had much of that stuff anyway. "Because we give a shit about doing the right thing, believe it or not. What do you want from me here, how convincing do you think I can be over the phone? Do you want to get on Facetime so I can show you the decapitated head of Jim Hudson or what?"

"Okay, take it easy. Sorry, but you get why we're worried, right?" said Joel. "The government hasn't been friendly to us."

"You know what? You'd better grab a pen because I'm gonna give you the information and then I'm done here," Jean-Paul said. The idea that he'd risked his job, and Aurora's and Niko's, and got caught, and got a scolding from Heather -- and now McCree was giving him shit -- it was too much for his pride to handle. "You can believe me or not, whatever. Sorry we tried to help your dumb English ass. 54 degrees, 2 minutes, 4.24 seconds north, 119 degrees, 48 minutes, 37.91 seconds west. Hope you got that, I'm not repeating it."

Joel was apparently smart enough to know when Jean-Paul wasn't bluffing, because he read the numbers back accurately. "That's it? Listen, I do appreciate you trying -- you especially, because Prawn never did anything for you but get you in trouble."

Jean-Paul weakened a little, because he knew that wasn't true; Prawn had saved him by warning him about the gas leak and the fire, something Jean-Paul would never have thought of or anticipated. In retrospect, he knew that he could outrun a disaster like that, but he hadn't known it then. And for that matter, Joel and Paul had paid his bail; Jean-Paul's father would have done that, but grudgingly and perhaps not right away. He could imagine his father's response: _It's a lot of money to get together at once, so you'll have to sit tight until Monday..._ He sighed. "Prawn is not my bosom buddy, but he deserves better than this. And Aurora likes him, for some reason."

"Go figure, eh?" It was quiet. "Do you have a name for this place?"

"It says 'Weapon Plus Program, New Facility'--" Jean-Paul said, but Aurora suddenly snatched the phone from him.

"You have to get Kyle too," she said, bent over the pages in her lap. "This says -- they did things to him. I have pictures here, he looks...twisted, like an animal. Not even like an animal," she added. "Animals are beautiful."

Joel sounded confused by this information. "Well, I mean...not to be a dick, but Kyle was always, uh, pretty rough-looking. Are you sure you're remembering the right guy?"

"I'm not crazy," Aurora hissed. "I know what I'm looking at. This is the guy I met, I can recognise his features, but they're wrong. The file says he started working here a few months ago, and they experimented on him. It just says a serum, I don't know what that means. And...oh." She stopped, shuffled the papers again. "Um. Okay, you're...you were right, I had the order wrong. This picture is how he looked in the beginning." The colour was grainy from the cheap printer, but it was definitely Kyle. He didn't look like anyone Aurora would have slept with; the long teeth were longer, the pointed ears less like a beautiful wildcat and more like an orc, the browbone heavier. "This one first. Then the experiments..." She turned the page to the picture of Kyle as she'd known him. 

_This is wildest dream stuff, for me._ Of course he hadn't been expecting to go home with anyone that night -- he probably wasn't used to girls finding him attractive at all. Christ, what if he'd been a virgin? Aurora had just thought he was over-eager. 

"They made him look normal, almost," she went on, telling the story as the pages laid it out for her. "Handsome. But then, whatever they were giving him, it stopped working or it broke down." The later pictures showed a strangely shrunken Kyle, his hair falling out in thick patches, looking in the end like Nosferatu: a jumble of fangs, yellowish claws, empty eyes that reflected red in the camera's flash. "The last pictures show him in a cage," she finished, her voice toneless. "And then they sent him to Weapon Plus, and they told me he was on medical leave."

Jean-Paul took the phone back. "Look, you should know something else -- Heather McNeil caught us while we were trying to get this information for you. She said...we argued with her and I think at the end she agreed with us, or at least she understood. And she said she'd 'handle the fallout', but we don't really know what that means. So just...if you plan on doing something about this, you should know that the government knows you know."

"Mother _fucker._ " Apparently this was the point where Joel finally snapped. Jean-Paul heard a loud _thwack_ , like something got thrown against a wall, followed by another angry noise or two, less identifiable.

"Still there?"

"Yeah, I'm still here," said Joel, breathless and with that note of vibrancy in his voice that suggested tears were coming next. "Christ, I can't -- never mind, sorry, this isn't your problem. Tell Aurora that we'll do what we can for Kyle. Fuck knows what that's gonna be, but we'll do it. Thanks for trying to help. I mean you did help, this is really good. Thank you. Tell Niko too, we're grateful. _Bonne nuit._ "

* * *

In the office at St-Jean-de-Dieu, Joel dropped the phone on top of the box of mail on his desk and put his head in his hands. Finally, a piece of luck -- the Beaubiers refusing to comply with their orders, a precious spark of human goodness in the midst of all this -- and then it was spoiled with _the government knows you know._

There was a soft knock at the door, followed by Dr. Xavier's voice. "Joel?"

"Yeah, just -- yeah." He got up to open the door. "Sorry, I'm sorry, everything's fine..."

"I can see that," said the Professor, glancing over at the wall; Joel had hurled a heavy three-hole punch across the room, where it had torn the poster of St. Clare of Assisi and made a divot in the drywall. "Would you like to talk?"

Joel sighed and went to retrieve the three-hole punch, setting it back on the desk. "I just got frustrated for a second."

"Oh, only for a second, I see. I know you're no longer my patient, but if you're frustrated, it might help to talk it out."

"Yeah, okay." Joel sank down on the patched Naugahyde couch, which squeaked weirdly as it always did. "The Beaubier twins, I told you about them -- they called from Department H and said they felt bad about everything and that they found out where Prawn and Paul are. I got coordinates, and they confirmed it was the Weapon Plus Program, so that sounds...pretty legit, I guess. And someone else I know is in there too, a guy who used to come by the house sometimes to sleep and shower. And then Jean-Paul breaks the news that his boss _caught them_ digging up the coordinates. He said 'the government knows you know' and I just lost my shit for a minute. I'm tired of being watched, I hate second-guessing everything all the time."

"That's very frustrating indeed," the Professor agreed. "So you don't know if you should trust this intelligence they gave you?"

"I think I trust what they said. But I'm afraid that if we go to try and bust out Prawn and the others -- however we're supposed to do that -- then there'll be an ambush waiting there or something. Listen to me, 'an ambush,'" he added with a snort. There was a fine tremor in his hands, and he balled them up at his sides. "Apparently I'm Scipio Africanus now."

Dr. Xavier smiled slightly. "That's an interesting name to pluck out of the air. He had the last laugh over Hannibal in the end, though at a heavy cost. Are you familiar with the Fabian strategy, from the same war?"

Joel nearly answered no, on the assumption that the conversation was about to get into military stuff that he had no idea about, but then he remembered. He'd always done well in Ms. Munroe's history class. "Yeah, it was an attrition strategy. Really unpopular, even though it worked."

"Correct. Hannibal was on foreign soil, and between the Alps and the Mediterranean, he couldn't get fresh supply trains from Carthage. Fabius used this to his advantage by harrying Hannibal's troops at the edges, never entering a pitched battle -- he knew that if Hannibal won too many victories on the field, Rome's allies would lose faith. Instead, Fabius just picked. A little here, a little there. Make the invaders suffer. Hannibal needed quick victories so that he could plunder, pay, and feed his own men, and Fabius denied him that. Now, historians agree that in military terms, this was the right choice," Dr. Xavier went on. "Subtle, elegant, and it allowed the Roman army to catch its breath and recover. But as you say, it was a political disaster. The Fabian strategy demoralised Hannibal, but it also demoralised Rome. The strategy created incredible psychological tension, and the Romans felt like they were being cowardly. They were frustrated. So they removed Fabius from command. What happened next?"

"Is this going to be on the exam?"

"Indulge me in a bit of the Socratic method, Joel. What was the result of abandoning the Fabian strategy?"

"Rome got their asses handed to them at Cannae."

"Precisely. Rome wanted a quick end to the long, drawn-out tension of the war. They chose to engage Hannibal at Cannae, where they lost very badly, because they were playing to Hannibal's strengths rather than their own. Tens of thousands of Romans died, about as many casualties as there were at Hiroshima. The Romans were so staggered by the loss that they resorted to human sacrifice, for the last time in their history. And so finally, Rome learned its lesson. They returned to the Fabian strategy and stopped trying to take the big flashy way out."

Joel shifted to lie down on the couch with his knees up, an arm under his head. "So...am I Fabius or Hannibal in this metaphor?"

"Neither, it's not a direct comparison. I'm saying that it's extraordinarily stressful to be losing by attrition, and that even when you're winning by such tactics, it can _feel_ like a loss. The human mind does not tolerate uncertainty very well. People crave victory, and when they can't have that, they even crave defeat. Don't you think that perhaps -- unconsciously -- the Romans were a little bit relieved by that tremendous loss at Cannae? Perhaps it was cathartic. They were free to mourn, to grieve. Even the human sacrifices are a sort of gruesome gesture of rage, pain, and desperation. They discharged the buildup of terror, and thus they found strength and resolve within themselves." 

Joel didn't reply, and Dr. Xavier motored over to the window, looking out at the gas-jet blue darkness outside. His mind brushed gently over Joel's like an archaeologist's whisk sweeping grains of sand from an artefact. "You're angry because you've been losing your security little by little," the Professor went on. "Losing it in small, negotiable details. First you must carry an ID card. Then your friends are arrested -- and that too becomes a routine, going to pay their bail and bring them home. Then the government tries to possess them in a different way, to absorb them into itself. You resist, but people trickle away in spite of your arguments. The government has even taken your health, in a way; I know you had hoped the Neurocherche treatment would help your seizures, but instead it just became another scene of struggle. They destroy your ability to trust your fellow mutants, and violate your privacy. Surveillance has profound psychological effects, which is exactly why they use it. To make sure you know they know, as Jean-Paul said. You must have read Foucault in school, yes?"

"I've read Foucault," Joel said. He'd hated Foucault and had barely finished _Discipline and Punish_ , which had been assigned at the end of a long term of postmodernism. He didn't have a better reason than that for hating it; he'd just been tired. _Everything makes me so fucking tired._ "And I get why that stuff is attractive to the government. They have a minority population that's unpredictable and powerful by definition, hard to control. When people think they're being watched, they behave."

"They comply," Dr. Xavier corrected him. "Which is a very different thing from choosing to control oneself. It strips people of their agency, which results in despair. Why plan, why hope, why dream when it seems impossible to take action?"

"But it _is_ impossible. Am I supposed to overthrow the government or something? I'm going to have my hands full just getting into Weapon Plus."

"Do you remember how many times you used to tell me -- very confidently -- that I don't like you?" said Dr. Xavier, turning his chair back from the window. "Because this is actually something about you that I find very endearing. You assume that it's up to you. Faced with a vast, diffuse, and difficult problem that affects thousands of people in this country, you think it's your responsibility."

"I'm not that arrogant," Joel said, stung. "I know other people are in this too--"

Dr. Xavier stopped him. "I wasn't calling it arrogance, although it could certainly go in that direction. It's more that you see problems and refuse to palm them off onto somebody else, which is why you started this house in the first place. It's neither a virtue nor a vice, just a piece of your personality. I suppose I relate to it because our backgrounds have some similarity -- privileged only children. The confluence of wealth and loneliness."

"Yeah, maybe," Joel admitted, thinking about home. The old house in Rockcliffe Park, now sold, a neighbourhood of embassies and mansions, each lot shrouded by trees above the river. He remembered wandering through the strips of woods as a child, so alone that he never really noticed it -- being alone was normal, the safe option. No interruptions, no distractions, no help, no praise, no blame. Everything in that forested little world depended on him. "But there _are_ a lot of people helping, it's not actually my precious solo mission or whatever. Even the Beaubier twins helped, and I thought they'd switched sides."

"True. I suppose I should ask you explicitly: would you like the X-Men's help?" asked the Professor, his tone careful. "Logan especially has his reasons, and Weapon Plus isn't just a Canadian concern -- we believe it's hopped the border more than once, for whichever government agency that offers them funding. But I would understand if you were uncomfortable, after what happened with your father."

That was an unexpected curveball. Strangely enough, Joel hadn't thought much about that connection, but now it embarrassed him: _yeah, they're your personal minions for every crisis._ Sometimes he felt like other people could always see the shadow of his father's influence while he missed it, a ghost in his blindspot. Following him around, obvious to everyone else, invisible to him. _It's not about Dad,_ he kept saying in conversations like this one, and it probably wasn't very convincing. "No, I don't -- I never, like, held a grudge about that or anything, Professor. It wasn't the police's fault either, it just -- the situation fell apart. That happens to everybody. I'd trust Mr. Summers with anything."

"I'm glad to hear it, and I think Scott will appreciate it too. He takes it hard when a mission doesn't go according to plan, and he hangs onto things for a long time. In any case, we'll bring the telepath girls home to Westchester tonight and then return to discuss strategic details," said Dr. Xavier, and he met Joel's eyes. "How do you feel about the fact -- and it is, unfortunately, a fact -- that rescuing mutants from Weapon Plus will require using force?"

"How do I feel? Like a hypocrite," Joel said, sitting up again on the couch. The headache was back, pain seeping through his skull...and then it stopped, like an orchestra responding to a conductor's baton. He raised his eyebrows at the Professor. "Is that you?"

Dr. Xavier nodded. "It's a post-ictal headache, so I'm blocking certain receptors in your brain to relieve the pain. Only temporary, but it gives you time to take an Advil. Like a hypocrite, you were saying?"

"Yeah, just...I feel like I'm just abandoning my principles because suddenly it's someone I care about, you know?" Joel went to the desk drawer and found a bottle of Advil that wasn't empty yet. "Like it's all about what I want. But then I'd also feel guilty and shitty if I put my stupid ideas ahead of my actual friends."

"So you've set up a situation where you fail the moral test either way."

"I guess."

"Which relieves you from having to make a decision, doesn't it?" said the Professor. "It's a bit like a politician covering all his bases."

Joel couldn't really argue with that, and he gave a shrug of assent as he dry-swallowed the Advil. "You're loving the fact that I'm not so crazy anymore and you can say stuff like that to me, right?" He would have still shrivelled up if someone else said it, like the spiritual directors at l'Institut Pastorale, but he'd finally absorbed the knowledge that Dr. Xavier was on his side. _Only took me five years._ "Yeah, it's...you're right. The truth is I want Paul back and I don't care how. So either that's personal baggage and I have to get over it, or I was wrong from the beginning and I caused a lot of chaos that didn't need to happen. Or maybe both."

"I think you should sit tonight with the truth of that feeling, regardless of the judgements your conscious mind might make," said Dr. Xavier. "You spend a lot of time with the judgements. Allow your heart some room."

"I will." Another night of dead, useless time with Paul gone. He had time to sit with his feelings, all right.

"Good." The Professor looked up at the torn poster of St. Clare. "Were you aiming for the lady's head, or was that a lucky hit?"

Joel laughed, a short exhalation. "You've seen me play hockey, you think I could hit anything I aimed at?"

"Athletics are not your strong suit, perhaps," Dr. Xavier said with a smile. "But at least you've found something that is."


	14. Man Changes Into Thunderbird

_I saw my city in the Scales, the pans_  
_Of judgment rising and descending. Piles_  
_Of dead leaves char the air—_  
_And I am a red arrow on this graph_  
_Of Revelations. Every dove is sold._  
_The Chapel's sharp-shinned eagle shifts its hold_  
_On serpent-Time, the rainbow's epitaph._  
_In Boston serpents whistle at the cold._  


— Robert Lowell

Paul's earliest memories were of being in his crib as a toddler, and wanting to get out. He remembered the plain white walls of his nursery (rented house, landlord wouldn't let them paint), the picture of Peter Rabbit hung on the near wall, the dummy pinned on a string to his sleepers, the grey winter light, and most of all, the closed door. When he could clamber out of the crib, he would slam his open palms against the door -- he remembered thinking that he wasn't doing it right, that he'd forgotten some key part of the procedure -- and yelling _entrez!_ which was also the wrong word. The strange thing was that for a couple of years after that, even when he'd learned that you knock with a closed fist, that you have to say _let me out_ instead of _come in_ , he still kept doing it the same old way, whenever his parents put him in his room. Children learn early on that if you act like a bit of a baby at just the right time, you can win some extra sympathy. As if to say, _remember when I was smaller? When I was easier to love?_

Then you hit some age where pulling that trick only makes people hate you more.

He thought of that now, wondering if there was some coded response he could give these people to remind them that he was just some guy, human in most of the ways that mattered. Was it better to be quiet and stoic? Would that impress them? Or would that make him easier to ignore? Should he get noisy?

The first time that he had half a chance to fight and scream, he was still blitzed on the drugs. Somnolent and blurred but still not comfortable, suffering through a blinding headache, he was neither asleep nor awake. Someone was unfastening the restraints and for almost a whole minute he thought _it was a mistake after all, they're letting me go_. His mouth was so dry that his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and he couldn't say anything but a slurred, "Thank you, thank you..."

The man holding him laughed. "Don't thank us," he said. "We haven't even started your treatment yet."

Then he understood that they weren't helping him. They were just moving him. No more hospital bed. Instead they picked him up by the shoulders and feet, two orderlies, one silent _heave ho_ , and they installed him in a hard plastic tank. It reminded Paul of the water table in a kindergarten classroom, where you float toy boats and margarine containers: a shallow tub, perched on wheels to make it waist-height, not yet filled. 

The main technician used a pair of heavy EMT shears to cut Paul's clothes off, and he hummed a little to himself as though this was a boring routine task for him. Paul tried to move and got rewarded with a telepathic blast.

He'd been hit before by clumsy telepaths, but this one was different: time seemed to slow and stretch, but not in his favour. The tech's movements were torturously slow now, and he could feel his own limbs moving at the same molasses rate as the tech held him down and clipped him into a new set of restraints on the sides of the tank. It didn't really disable him, but it made the experience of fighting back feel like some incredibly creative punishment.

After what felt like an hour or two, the effect wore off. The tech was still fussing with equipment, catheter tubes and IV pumps. "Now, you see?" the tech said calmly. "You don't behave, it just takes longer. You don't like that, do you?"

Paul was getting desperate to feel something from these people other than calm boredom, even if rage or contempt were the only other options, but... "No, I don't like that."

"Smart kid." The tech flipped a few switches on a machine hooked up to the tank, and for a second Paul blearily thought he'd wet himself. No, the tank was just filling up. "You can go back to sleep if you want."

The water was warm, body-temperature. It didn't threaten to drown him, too shallow for that, but it came close, lapping at the corners of his mouth. Brackish and faintly metallic. It reminded him of the latex and clove smell of a dentist's office, so artificial and so viscerally linked with memories of pain. 

When the tech was gone, Paul made a few attempts to squeeze out of the restraints. Not happening. His joints were pretty flexible (he'd always been able to bend his thumbs all the way back as a parlour trick), but the tank's dimensions didn't allow any leverage. He couldn't even lift his head without pulling painfully on some needle in his neck. 

The room was almost dark, lit by the LEDs on the machines and Paul's own bioluminescence, a few moving reflections on the ceiling from the water. The reflections looked like swimmers doing the butterfly stroke, endless rows of them windmilling across the ceiling, the only thing there was to look at.

Time passed. Very slowly, but it passed.

Sometimes Paul felt himself drifting, either asleep or something close to it just because he was so bored that his brain seemed to be shutting down. Chills ran over his skin every few minutes, gooseflesh unconnected with temperature. He didn't actually get goosebumps anymore, no matter how cold he was; it was another mammalian vestigial reflex that his mutation had shut down. The sensation now felt foreign, uneasy ripples of something unknown under his skin. 

Every time he heard footsteps coming down the hall he tensed with excitement, desperate to see anyone, even another apathetic technician. Solitary boredom sounded like a piddly problem -- _it's not like they're really torturing you, whiner_ \-- but it was still worse than it sounded. He'd been through it before on psych wards, but at least there he'd always had the option of going to the common room to watch Dr. Phil with the other inmates. That seemed like an impossible luxury now. 

Finally one of the hallway sounds paid off: someone opened the door. Paul couldn't sit up, but he saw a lab-coated figure approach into his field of vision. Dr. Hines from yesterday. Yesterday? Before, anyway. She checked the machines first, making a note on her chart, before making eye contact with him. 

"Doing okay?" she said, as if this were a normal hospital, as if he'd asked to be here and they were taking care of him. 

"I don't know, am I?" Paul said, but he was too tired and (sadly enough) glad to see another human to be very waspish. Too tired for rebellion. "I still don't know what you're trying to do here."

"We already told you," she said, glancing back at one of the monitors. "We're trying to trigger your X-gene again to stimulate further development of your mutation."

"Right, you said that, but I don't know what it means. I wouldn't know if it was going well or not."

"We don't know exactly what the result will be either," said Dr. Hines, and she didn't sound like that bothered her at all. "We have a few guesses, based on genetic patterns and previous experimentation, but we might be wrong. Maybe nothing will happen. I was really just asking you how you feel, subjectively."

 _Do you care?_ Maybe she did, in her way. Paul couldn't get the scent of insincerity from her. Maybe she didn't want to see him harmed right in front of her, even though she had no respect for his rights as a human. It sounded weird but he'd seen that pattern over and over in safety centres and hospitals, and it made him think there was hope for dealing with her. If you didn't ask these people to bend the whole system for you, they might relent and give you small concessions when they saw suffering right in front of them. "I'm really bored," he admitted. "Freaking out."

"Comfortable? No pain?"

"No pain. Hungry."

She nodded. "You're on a nasogastric feeding tube, so they'll start the pump soon. That's just the simplest way to manage your nutritional needs, because they're rather exotic. Okay, so you're tolerating treatment well enough. We'll let you talk to your friend now, if you like."

Paul knew that he shouldn't be grateful, that this was exactly how people developed Stockholm Syndrome, but he couldn't help the swell of relief that ran through him, a momentary flare of rose-gold and cobalt blue over his skin. "God, yes, I want to see him..."

She opened the door and let Prawn in, although she didn't offer to help Paul sit up or even to cover him up for modesty. Unlike the staff, Prawn was accompanied by a wave of emotion: fear, pain, desperation, all of it eye-watering and pungent. He was in a wheelchair, and as he drew closer Paul could see him, partly obscured through the translucent plastic of the tub, draped in a hospital gown and blanket. His eyes were bandaged shut and his head was shaved, another bandage on his temple.

"Jesus Christ, Prawn--" One of the needles dragged at his skin as Paul automatically tried to sit up and failed. "What the fuck did they do to you?"

"Surgery." Prawn's voice was wilted and colourless, still a little slurred from anaesthetic. "Don't ask me what they were _trying_ to do, I've no idea. What are they doing with you? I can't even see..."

"I don't really know either," Paul said, chilled even with the sickly heat of the liquid in the tank. Dr. Hines had left the room, but he knew they weren't really alone. "They keep saying they want to -- I don't know, they think my mutation never finished developing, I guess. Or else they just think that whatever it did do isn't good enough. I'm hooked up to a lot of machines here," he added, so that Prawn would know what he couldn't see. "Or can you sense those?"

Prawn shook his head. "This thing here--" He tapped a metal contraption fitted around his neck like a choker. "I can sense _it_ , even though its circuits are well-protected. Nothing past that point. They found a way to make me useless, hurrah for science." He paused. "I'm not going to be the one to get us out, Paul. I know you might've been...you were probably hoping I would, yeah?"

"Yeah," Paul admitted. Pointless to lie. He was out of the habit, in any case, even though Prawn couldn't see him. "But it's okay. If it's not you it'll be someone else."

"I don't know if Joel can pull that off, mate," Prawn said, rubbing the edge of the tape that held the bandages over his eyes. "I know he'd try, but we don't even know where we are. Not that I've had a lot of time to think about it. Fuck knows how long I've been asleep."

This was very discouraging. Maybe that was why the staff were even letting them talk to each other, Paul thought. "Joel knows people, he has connections. He can find us. And I'm not just getting emotional and stupid about my _boyfriend_ , okay?" he said, before Prawn could say anything about it, pronouncing the word with an exaggerated English accent. "Or whatever. He's awful at small talk but he's good in an argument, he can get people on board."

"I think sometimes he argues people right out of agreeing with him," Prawn said wearily. "He doesn't know when to stop pushing."

"Yeah, that's true, but you didn't leave, did you?" Paul didn't know how much he believed in what he was saying, but he wanted it to be true. "Look, I don't agree with half his ideas either. But here I am anyway. If it were just because I like _him_ I could've stayed in Longueuil." _Which I should have done._ Traitorous thought, and not even sincere; Paul didn't regret working at the house, one of the most meaningful choices he'd ever made. It wasn't about a crush. "Joel will help us, he'll find a goddamn way. I'm not just pinning my hopes on somebody who can't deliver."

"Maybe." Prawn didn't sound convinced.

"It can't be -- this can't be how it ends." Lie. "Things can't keep happening like this, in this country." Lie. A squirming, greyish yellow-green colour ran over Paul's skin, and even though Prawn couldn't see it, he knew the dishonesty was obvious. People did die this way and things like this happened in every goddamned country, because the world wasn't fair and it never would be. "Are you okay, are they -- they're not treating the pain, I can smell it on you..."

"They're giving me drugs all the time, but it's..." Prawn hesitated, his voice taut. "Drugs only do so much. I don't know what they did to my eyes but it feels like they sliced them up with a fucking cheese wire."

That didn't make sense to Paul, even with the kind of serial killer logic at work in this place, but then he thought he might see the reasoning. "But your mutation is -- you can see radiation too, right? You said that once?"

"Well, yeah," said Prawn, as if that were obvious. "Sort of, anyway. What, you think they were just digging around in my eyeballs hoping they'd find out how it works?"

Paul lay still in his tank, where the underwater restraints had rubbed his skin raw around the wrists and ankles. Another sick chill ran over him. His skin felt ready to split, and when he moved slightly he felt a strange _scraping_ sensation, his spine raking the bottom of the tub as if the vertebrae were exposed. Not painful, just very, very wrong. "That sounds like something they'd do." 

"Christ." Prawn opened and closed his right hand as though his fingers felt strange, knuckles popping. He drew in a sharp breath, fighting off tears, with a smell of despair that was like algae in a lake, dark and slippery and wet. "How can they do this?" he said in a ragged whisper. "Who could have the heart? God, I sound stupid, but how can they do this?"

"I don't know." There were lots of political answers to that question, but Paul knew that wasn't what Prawn was asking. "I wish I did."

"Maybe -- no, fuck it, I'm changing my mind. I just want out, fuck getting answers. Right now, if I found a way to get out and I had to leave everyone else behind -- I'm so fucking desperate I'd just go and take my chances with the decades of guilt. That's as evil as they are, isn't it? It hasn't even been a day, or no, it's...well, it hasn't been a week, I'm pretty sure of that," Prawn mumbled. "But they're taking us to bits in here, Paul. How long are we supposed to put up with that before it's, like, normal for us to go mental?"

"I don't know," Paul said again. At home he would have said _don't call it going mental_ , but here he didn't have the energy. "If you want permission to fall apart, man, just do it. You can go through this however you need to. And listen, if you _actually_ leave me behind in here I'll haunt you like the ghost of Tecumseh, but you're not gonna do that. You're a good guy, Prawn. You got into this because you wanted to help a bunch of girls you never met. That's not evil."

Prawn didn't answer, but he didn't have to; a thin current of gratitude wafted through his misery, a bit like baking bread, warm and yeasty. It didn't chase the rest away, but it lingered in the air for a moment. "Tell me again," Prawn said after a minute. "Tell me we'll get out, say it like you believe it. That'll be enough for now."

Paul swallowed and tried to come up with something good, something strong. _I don't belong here, I should be at home with Joel loading the dishwasher and neither of us should have ever tried to do the things we did._ He had to shove that thought down. He wondered what Joel would even say if he were here; probably he'd dig up some snippet of rhetoric from an illustrious saint, or else he'd just stick stubbornly to the message. _We're getting out, Prawn._ Paul couldn't make that sound convincing. Not now. And he didn't know any good saint stories. He only had his own faith to work with. 

Finally he said, "Someone came for those girls in Neurocherche. So someone's gonna come for us. We've been working for mutants in the city for years now, and we didn't do it to get payback, but people do remember it when someone helps them. People want to give back, that's normal. Human nature. We're not alone and we haven't been abandoned. The city won't forget what we did for them."

"Okay," Prawn said quietly. He was too quiet tonight. "Yeah, that sounds good. It is good. Thanks, mate."

* * *

**To:** veronicageier@ottawacitizen.com  
 **From:** anonymousburner4236@gmail.com  
 **Subject:** newsworthy documents from Neurocherche

Dear Ms. Geier,  
Attached please find a collection of documents from the private clinic and research group Neurocherche of Repentigny, PQ, which was recently damaged by mutant activists. These files were downloaded from Neurocherche's internal computers, and although we have removed the confidential information of individual patients, what remains are policies, procedures, company memos, minutes from meetings, accounting information, and more. 

There is ample proof here that Neurocherche treated its patients in a dehumanising, abusive, and frankly sinister manner. The company also has broader ties to the federal government which remain shadowy; you might discover more than we were able to. 

We believe this information ought to be made public and are therefore releasing it to the Citizen. We hope you make good use of it.

Regards,  
anonymous (small a)

* * *

Joel had dictated the text of the email to Will, but had otherwise kept his hands off the operation, since he was likely to muck it up somehow. Will had disappeared late at night with the USB drive and a few hundred dollars in expenses -- he paid cash for a dirt-cheap netbook at Wal-Mart, switched faces, hopped a banlieue train all the way out to Mont-Saint-Hilaire, found a Tim Horton's open 24 hours, leaked the data, switched faces again, and headed back into the city. At St-Jean-de-Dieu, he arrived with a flimsy netbook, the battery removed.

"Don't put the battery back in -- or plug it in either -- unless you're going to check that single Gmail account," Will said. He looked so completely different that Joel almost found it hard to trust him: maybe twenty years younger, a fortyish man with an open, kindly face, crow's-feet around hazel eyes, greying hair in a buzzcut, a lanky frame with a habitual stoop. But the accent was the same, and his way of shaping words, even though the voice was different. "Do not use it on your home WiFi, and don't use a public network anywhere near here either. Do what I did and pick a random place where you don't usually go. Don't bring your mobile with you. Don't use your metro card, pay cash. Cash at Tim Horton's, cash everywhere. Then you do your business on Gmail and get out."

"I think they can guess it was me, if they're any good at being journalists," Joel said, taking the netbook carefully, as if it were a bomb. "Maybe we're going too far--"

"Yeah, they can _guess_ , but they'll have a hard time proving it, if you do what I'm telling you," said Will. "Remember that you got that data by committing a crime. A regular bog-standard crime, not just being a mutant in the wrong place. The newspaper will try to protect you as a source but that only goes so far. I know that you present a bit of a conundrum to the law, since they can't easily _habeas_ your _corpus_ unless you volunteer, but your Israeli friend could find herself in hot water. She left metadata behind on that USB stick -- I scrubbed it, but that's the kind of thing that can fuck you over."

Joel winced at that; he thought he'd been careful about keeping Hodya separate from all this. "Christ, you're right, thanks. I should call her, just in case."

"No, you shouldn't," said Will, opening the fridge to rummage around. He and Faiza had been hanging around the house long enough to stop standing on ceremony. "I mean, go ahead and ring her up if you like, but don't tell her you leaked stolen corporate files to a national paper. Don't tell her, don't tell your mum, don't post about it on Facebook..."

"You don't need to be an arsehole," Faiza said mildly from the kitchen table. It was six in the morning, but none of them had slept soundly enough to feel soft or foggy. They were waiting for the X-Men to show up and trying to psych themselves up. "Is it like the Doctor's regenerations, you ended up rude and not ginger this time?"

"Right, you've never seen me be rude. You must be so shocked." In spite of the chiding, and in spite of the midnight trip out to Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Will didn't seem to be in bad humour. Leaking to the media was the kind of task he enjoyed. "Anyone want eggs if I make them?"

"Cooking for the community, you're really taking to the Catholic Worker spirit here," Joel remarked. There was tea on the table already, and he and Faiza were finishing off a box of Shreddies between them. The house felt much quieter now without the telepath girls, even though they hadn't stayed long. "Yeah, go ahead, they won't be starting real breakfast here for another two hours. And we might be busy by then."

"So we hope." Faiza shook out a last few Shreddies into her bowl, frowning at the dust that came out from the bottom of the box, and topped it off with more milk. "Milk in bags is so weird, why do you guys even do this?"

"It saves plastic and keeps the milk fresh longer. Don't they have these in England? Prawn knew the drill."

"They have them up north in some places, that's probably why," Will said, getting a pan out of the cupboard. "Before that I only saw them in the USSR."

"Yeah, where you and James Bond defeated Le Chiffre, whatever," said Faiza sourly. "You're the biggest tease when it comes to stories, I'm not even taking the bait anymore."

"You're assuming a lot about which side I'd be on in a Bond novel."

Faiza pointed her spoon at him. "See, that there? You're doing it again. I don't even care, I'm not asking follow-up questions. I'm having a conversation with Joel about milk bags." She ostentatiously turned her chair in Joel's direction, away from Will. "Seriously though, what's the plan? If you don't mind talking about it. I know the X-Men are going to be in the battle -- which will be _legendary_ , I can't believe I'll have to miss it when I'm this close."

"That's about as much as I know too." Joel was grateful to them for chatting and bickering gently with each other; he appreciated some levity when the situation was so grim, especially if he could just sit there without feeling like he had to participate. "I don't know, if you ask Mr. Summers he might want you to go. Mutant surgery is a pretty useful power."

"You call him Mr. Summers, that's adorable," said Faiza with a smile. "My Twitter thumb's getting very itchy, being around mutant celebrities and having to stay mum. Being in the MI13 is like some kind of monkey's paw curse sometimes, getting to do cool stuff but not being able to tell anyone. Am I getting on your nerves? Too much fannish glee?" She got up to bring her empty bowl to the dishwasher. "And I'd be over the moon to help, so long as I wasn't getting in the way. Or causing an international incident."

"You're not getting on my nerves. I'm hoping it _won't_ be a legendary battle, actually, but you can't always get what you want." Joel kept checking his phone, a mannerism that always bugged him when other people did it. _Time to let that pet peeve go._ He didn't know how long it would take for a headline to show up on the _Citizen_ 's twitter feed. Would they really care enough to run a story about the documents, or were they less scandalous to normal people than he thought? "And the horse has left the barn, as far as moral behaviour goes."

"Sorry, how's that?" Faiza said as she sat down at the table again, topping up her tea. 

"Just like -- Will's right, I did commit crimes. We did a lot of it by the seat of our pants, we didn't plan very carefully, and that's...civil disobedience is supposed to be planned. It's supposed to be done consciously for a higher purpose, not a bunch of dumb kids running around like we were. Like Antigone," Joel added. "She broke one law as a focused protest, and she took the punishment. To prove that she wasn't afraid, to prove that she was following her conscience."

"Whoa, whoa, that's a lot of ideas at once," said Faiza. She filled Joel's cup too. "Antigone works as a heroine because her case is simple. The play feels powerful because the choice was so stark, so tragic. Most of these stories you hear about heroes and martyrs -- and yeah, superheroes too -- they get boiled down to the bones, because that's how symbols are supposed to work. Reality's more complicated."

"Yeah, but -- I know it's complicated, just..." It was hard to articulate what he meant. "It was right to blow Neurocherche open. But the way we did it was clumsy and invasive, and maybe I _should_ be arrested for that stuff."

"For what?" said Will from the stove. "To get thrown in the same kind of place your friends are in? In this alternate universe where they could confine you?"

"I don't want to just rely on my mutation to stay above the law. And I don't want to go to prison, but I'd like to fight the case, if I could get a fair trial. There were no legal options to do the right thing. We were supposed to just leave the girls there and let them get abused."

"Sure, but the operative phrase there is 'if you could get a fair trial.' The law is fundamentally unjust to mutants," said Faiza. "That's the point of all this, right? If the law says Neurocherche is right to be abusing patients, and you're wrong to help them escape, then how legitimate is the law?"

Joel was quiet for a few moments as he thought about that, while Will dished up the scrambled eggs. They were nicer than he would have expected from an older British bachelor, fluffy rather than greasy, tossed together with a bit of feta and dill. "It's hard," he said finally, looking down at his plate. "It's not just...I mean, my dad believed in this stuff. Justice and law, whatever. I know, ell-oh-ell at a politician believing in things, but he did."

"I get you, I'm not laughing. You do still have a mother, yeah?" Faiza said, taking the edge off the question with a half-smile. "You gonna let her know that you're planning something dangerous, or leave that for a fun surprise later?"

"Christ, you're right, I actually -- I forgot," Joel said, embarrassed now, picking his phone up again. "I really did, I was going to call her and see if I could get hold of Paul's mom. That's safe, right? Not giving up strategic secrets or anything," he added. "Just letting them know they can start praying, I guess."

"Go ahead. What are you _not_ going to mention?" said Will.

"The leak."

"Good man."

Joel picked up his plate and the phone and brought them into the office with him. He tried Paul's mother first, not expecting much. He had to check her number with the white pages, finding her among dozens of other Lalibertés in Longueuil. 

He'd visited Paul at his house just once, after moving to Montreal but before everything really went nuclear; that only happened when Paul came out to his parents. A bland suburban house with beige siding and brickface, faux-shutters, two cars in the driveway, hockey nets in the street. A very normal place, Joel had thought, like being on the set of a cereal commercial. It felt safe, not only from obvious threats but also from judgement: this was the default type of house to live in, the kind of place you didn't have to feel shame or guilt about. 

After eight rings, a man sleepily answered the phone, and Joel had to re-calibrate. "Um -- hello Monsieur..." He didn't have a surname for Paul's step-dad, and he hated to first-name older adults, especially over the phone. _Monsieur_ would have to do. "Is Madame Laliberté there?"

"Who's this?"

"It's Joel McCree." He winced as he said his own name, waiting to be hung up on. "This is about Paul."

Silence. Then, curtly: "Hold on."

A very long pause. Joel could hear faint voices arguing. Finally Paul's mother came on the line. Her name was Sylvie, a real estate agent with slender wrists and an improbable year-round tan. "What."

"Sorry, I know it's early. I just wanted to let you know, um, that Paul is in custody right now."

"He's what?"

From the ambient noises, Joel was almost certain that he'd disturbed the couple in their bedroom, like an asshole. "He's being held in -- we think -- in a facility outside the Montreal area. Not a regular safety centre. It sounds like this is news to you too, so I assume that they didn't notify you at all?"

"He's an adult. Why would they notify me?" she said. "Aren't you his _conjoint de fait_ by now?"

It was a chilly, legal term for a common law partner. "No, I'm not. He and I weren't in a romantic relationship." _Congrats, that was both cold and slippery. You'll win her over in no time, talking like that._ "Look, he never stopped filling in your name as his next of kin on forms, so I thought you'd want to know."

That earned a flicker of hesitation. "I'm not bailing him out, so what do I need to know about it for? I'll say it again, he's an adult, and if he got himself into trouble it's his business now."

"There is no bail, so it's not about that. I'm just -- you're his mother," Joel said, forcing himself not to tighten up. There was no point to this phone call if he was going to treat her like an enemy. "Mothers have a right to worry about their kids, even if things aren't perfect between you. I'm not asking you for anything, and there's nothing you can really do about it. Unfortunately. Really I'd just like you to keep him in your thoughts. Is that all right?"

She sighed. "What did he even do?"

The government seemed reluctant to formally press charges or name suspects in the news, so the Neurocherche situation wasn't yet tied to St-Jean-de-Dieu. "He got caught someplace he wasn't allowed to be."

"Figures," Sylvie said. "He used to do that with his friends, sneaking around. I told him...it doesn't matter. No bail, so where the hell was he? A missile base?"

"He was trying to help people. Young women who were being hurt." Joel's fitful appetite had disappeared, and the smell of the eggs now nauseated him, so he went to the window to put some space between him and the plate. "If you want to blame me, go ahead, because he wasn't essential, he could have stayed home. I blame me too."

"So what, you say it first and that means I can't get angry?" she said. "This was some stupid revolutionary thing you were trying to do, is that it? You know, I tried everything to give Paul a normal life. Maybe now I'm some kind of witch to the two of you, but I don't hate mutants. I just didn't buy into the propaganda that a mutation can never be unhealthy, that there's no point in trying to treat it. I had to watch my son starve in front of me because we didn't know what to feed him, for _years._ He looked like a cancer patient -- his hair was even falling out. So I looked for doctors, and yeah, sue me, I kept looking even after we knew for sure that he was a mutant. I thought there had to be something we could do. Then there was the bipolar, and you didn't see the worst of that--"

"I was _in_ St. Rita's with him," Joel interrupted, taking bait that he should have left alone. "I saw enough--"

"You barely knew him then. He accused us of terrible things while he was manic, he had delusions that I was trying to poison him for insurance money," Sylvie said. "Which is not his fault, I know that, but for years he was in denial. He'd get back to normal, they'd release him, he'd stop taking his meds. Boom, back at St. Rita's. That was hard on us, do you understand? He wouldn't apologise. I know he was embarrassed, but didn't we deserve an apology for that? 'Maman, sorry I thought you wanted to murder me,' how hard is that? 'Maman, sorry that I went off my meds even though I know what happens when I do that.' He didn't do even that much for us. No. By the time he decided to move in with you and be a homosexual, we'd been through enough. I wanted to give him a happy, quiet life. He rejected that. Now he's in jail? Well, it looks good on him, is all I can say." She let out a short, sharp breath, but then the fear flooded back into her voice. "God, my boy, my baby..."

"I know sick teenagers are hard to live with, because I sure was. But--" _But how is he supposed to apologise now when you won't talk to him?_ It was a fair enough point, but it wasn't his job right now to argue with her or play counsellor. "Okay. Is there anything you want me to pass along, when I see him?"

She paused. "You don't mean an official visit, do you? No phones and plexiglass?"

Hell if he was going to confirm or deny that over the phone. "I mean whenever I'm able to see him," he said.

She made a disapproving sound, but then she said, "Tell him I don't hate him," and she hung up.

Great. Progress.

Joel sat on the windowsill for awhile, staring out at the dark blue morning, the exhaust that billowed in the cold air outside as cars warmed up, taillights red in the gloom, neighbours getting ready for work. The sun wasn't up yet, just a thin strip of white gold low down in the sky. He could feel the threat of panic ( _isn't there some way to hide from all this?_ ) and forced it back down. Then, even though he felt like he'd earned a break, he called his mother.

His mother had retired from teaching, and now did advocacy work for disabled kids, especially mutants. She was probably busier now than before she'd retired. Wherever she was right now, asleep or in the shower or already on the road, she wasn't answering the phone. Her outgoing message was formal, recited in her telephone voice, clear and crisp: _"You've reached the voicemail of Lillian McCree. Please leave a message and I'll return your call as soon as possible."_

"Hi, Mom. It's me. Uh, some stuff is going on over here -- I can't really talk about it but it'll probably be on the news pretty soon. That's a bad way to start. Sorry. I'm okay, Paul's not. Sorry that this is how you find out, it just...all got away from me. I love you, is what I mean. Tell Aunt Carmel and everybody I love them too. I'm sorry for all the times when I was a pain, which is a lot. I love you. Bye."

* * *

The X-Men showed up ten minutes ahead of schedule, a lean crew: just Mr. Summers and Dr. Grey and Logan. Joel wasn't sure whether that was a gesture of confidence or futility; Mr. Summers certainly seemed like he'd expected to count Faiza in as part of the group. "Professor said you guys were willing to help," he said as they got out of the rental car at the airstrip outside the city. No flamboyant urban landings this time. "And we want this operation to be absolutely spic-and-span, so the more people with non-lethal powers the better. It's not just the living cross-section ability, right? You can freeze people in their tracks, I heard?"

"Yeah -- yes, I can control people's bodies on a subatomic level," Faiza answered, holding down a stray fold of her hijab as it flapped in the wind. "It's like telekinesis that only works on human bodies. Well, biological organisms, but humans are -- it'll be humans, won't it?"

"Let's all just hope. Okay, good, so effectively we've got two telekinetics. Just to reiterate..." Mr. Summers turned towards Logan. "This is a no-kill operation. You got that? Bad optics if anyone dies today, I don't care why or who deserves it. It'll look bad on the news, and the fallout will be bad for mutants in this country. Clear?"

Logan shrugged. "Worried about me, One Eye?"

"Should I be worried?"

"I ain't gonna tell you how to feel. Honour your truth, rainbow child."

"Logan." Dr. Grey sounded tired. "If you guys want to pick at each other, just get it out of your systems now."

Logan held up his hands in mock defeat. "I'm not picking, I'm just not sure I see the logic of asking the guy with razor claws along on a no-kill mission."

"The logic," said Mr. Summers, "is that along with the claws, you have a healing factor. You're going to be creating a few diversions. If the scene gets swarmed by guards, you keep them busy. If there's guns in the mix, you draw their fire."

"Oh, I like this idea."

"I know you can handle it. You're the best there is at what you do," Mr. Summers said dryly. "And what you do best is crashing around causing chaos and drawing everybody's attention. So do that. Just be careful, is all I'm saying."

Logan seemed like he was thinking about arguing, but after a moment he just nodded, glancing over his shoulder at the empty stretch of road, the snowy fields around the airstrip. "And the kid is recon?"

"The kid is recon," Mr. Summers confirmed, turning to Joel. "That means you'll be going in first. We need you to report on the layout of hallways, locations of security stations and anywhere else the staff might cluster, alternate exits, and obviously we want to know where the targets are. Don't worry if you can't remember every single detail in one trip, okay? I'd rather we sit around waiting for a couple of hours while we scout the place thoroughly than rushing through it and then getting a surprise. Okay?"

"Yeah."

"Stay in full stealth mode as much as possible -- if you absolutely need to be visible for some reason, don't come out of it all the way. They might have their own telepaths on staff, so don't give them a chance to read you. Just to make sure, you definitely can't take anyone else with you when you go under, right?"

"I could take Paul if we have to," Joel said, shoulders hunched against the wind. "Probably not anybody else."

"Unpack that 'probably' for me. Why not?"

"I need to know the person pretty well, and Paul's the only one it's ever worked on. And it messed with him." Joel tried to get more specific, since Mr. Summers liked vague answers even less than the Professor did. "A minute or two left him really freaked out, I mean. If I tried it with someone else they might not come back properly at all." 

"Okay. Would you say -- and this is a serious question, because you have a better idea of it than I would -- if that happened to someone, they didn't come back right, is that worse than being dead? I know that's a really unfair question," said Mr. Summers. "Because you've never done it and you don't know, but I have to weigh outcomes here. If that's the choice, either roll the dice on an untested method or let a person die, what's your gut feeling?"

It was definitely a really unfair question, Joel thought. "Whenever people asked my dad legal questions at parties he always started the answer with 'it depends.'"

"What's it depend on?"

"It depends who it is. If it's Prawn, chances are okay. If it's you or Dr. Grey or Faiza, maybe. Still better than dying, I guess. If it's Mr. Logan--"

"They can't kill me, kid, don't worry about it," Logan interrupted without bravado, re-lighting the already-burnt end of a cigar that he'd taken out of his pocket. "I ain't a mister, either."

"Don't get started on smoking that, we're gonna board the Blackbird in a minute. So your method is available as a last resort?" said Mr. Summers.

"If the person's guaranteed to die, and if they have a few minutes first, then I guess it's worth a shot," Joel said reluctantly. "I could try to get them over to Faiza that way. But it still might be a really bad idea."

"All right. The more you know, guys. We'll make a more detailed plan of attack once we have our initial scouting passes done and we know the layout. Let's go." Mr. Summers turned to head for the Blackbird.

Logan took the cigar out of his mouth. "Not gonna return the rental car, Boy Scout?"

"When we get out of this, I'll call Avis myself and tell them exactly where they can pick it up," Mr. Summers said. "I'm sure the Canadian government already knows we're here but I don't want to make it _that_ easy for them."

"Avis thinks that car was rented by three American tourists from Florida," said Dr. Grey, following with Joel and Faiza on the way to the Blackbird. "Two kinda pudgy guys, identical twins, in their late sixties, and one blue-haired lady with cat-eye glasses, straight out of a Gary Larson cartoon. Security cam footage will contradict whatever I put in their heads so I thought I might as well have fun with it."

"Department H definitely already knows," Joel said.

* * *

"The X-Men are already on Canadian soil and they have the location of Weapon Plus," General Clarke was saying. "Thanks to not one, not two, but _three_ of your recruits. This situation is out of control."

Jim Hudson wasn't saying a goddamned thing. Heather was getting annoyed. They were in Clarke's office at headquarters being called up on the carpet like a couple of Subway sandwich artists who put the cheese triangles in the wrong direction. Like a kid at McDonalds who snapped over the drive-thru speaker. Like immature people who didn't know or care about being professional, and who'd made some rookie mistake. Not like adults in a delicate situation who'd made the best choices they could. She was standing there taking it, hands folded behind her back at parade rest, but she wasn't going to take it forever. _Come on, you cocksucker, blame it on me one more time. I dare you._

General Jeremy Clarke was the military liaison for Alpha Flight, a stern ( _pompous ass_ ) and unapproachable ( _pompous ass_ ) government desk jockey with a shaved head ( _he probably waxes it_ ) and a thick neck that filled out his shirt collars weirdly. 

Heather didn't like him too much.

"I understand that Network is very young and impressionable," Clarke said, pacing very slowly in front of his huge office window. Floor to ceiling, magnificent view of the city crowned with Parliament Hill in the snow. Clarke's desk faced in the opposite direction, so that he could sit with the glare from outside obscuring his face, like the corporate heavy in a hacky action flick. Or so that he could do this, pace back and forth in front of a patriotic symbol, looking serious and powerful. "And I know that the twins operate as a unit. But more to the point, I see that the three people on your team who've had dealings with McCree all chose to help him, even though you were warned that he has a habit of manipulating people."

"This is absurd," Heather said coldly, unable to hold back any longer. "That kid's not Hannibal Lecter. The Beaubiers decided to do it because they weren't happy about how the mission turned out. Aurora pushed Niko into helping."

"So this was all a coincidence, in your view."

"In my view, the Beaubiers don't especially like McCree." _Which you would know if you'd ever spent time interacting with them._ "They do like Dudley and Laliberté. They did this because they didn't like what they were asked to do, and they're not obedient little soldiers. They think for themselves and they don't like it when relevant information is hidden from them. They don't like being asked to hurt people who pose no threat. You could have--" She stopped herself, then corrected the pronoun. "We could have arrested Dudley and made a solid argument for it. He's an actual risk. But we took Paul Laliberté too, and he's harmless."

Clarke had stopped pacing, his back to them as he stared out the window. "Oh?"

"Am I missing something? Can he shoot lasers out his ass or what?"

"Heather," Jim said, giving her a _shut up while you still can_ look.

Heather ignored him. "No, please, tell us what the idea is there. He should never have been moved to Weapon Plus when a safety centre would have held onto him just fine. McCree would have just paid the bail like he always does. It would've been peaceful. Paul has no offensive powers, no defensive powers, no criminal record, no money, no political connections. What are we gaining by holding onto him?"

"You were briefed on the mission objectives. Paul does have a political connection, and its name is Joel McCree. Five years ago, that wouldn't have been a big deal. Jim McCree's career had peaked and he was in decline, stuffed away in the Senate. But someone shot him in the neck and everything changed. Now he's a symbol. His son is a symbol too, or at least he could be if someone used him the right way, and the Prime Minister wants that factor controlled. We can't slap the cuffs on him, and even if we could it'd be a bad move. But the media won't care about Paul Laliberté, even though McCree will. It sends the message that actions have consequences." Clarke paused. "Besides, we're also benefitting by gaining scientific data. Neurocherche is gone, so Weapon Plus is picking up the slack when it comes to research."

Jim finally spoke up. "At least the patients at Neurocherche wanted treatment," he said. "I'm not saying that what happened there was good, but we were still somewhere in the neighbourhood of _maybe_ doing ethical science. Doing that to prisoners is just flat-out wrong. The Beaubiers were right to have second thoughts about it. They should have come to us rather than hassling Network into helping them, but they wanted to do the right thing. I'm more concerned about why they thought they couldn't bring their issue to us."

"It doesn't seem like any kind of mystery to me," said Clarke. "It's a discipline issue. Alpha Flight isn't ready for serious missions if you're having problems like this just dealing with a handful of activists in Quebec. You're not ready for Weapon X. I'm going to recommend six weeks of more intense training in Combat Centrale to build esprit de corps and interpersonal trust. If we don't see progress after that, it may be time to rethink staffing."

"You'll fire and replace us, you mean."

"You would not be fired," Clarke corrected Heather in the patient, humourless tone beloved by Ottawa bureaucrats. "Rather we would simply decline to extend your temporary contract."

Jim probed at one of his molars with his tongue, an obvious _look how many things I'm not saying_ expression. "Sir, I agree that Alpha Flight needs to feel tighter as a unit, that's absolutely true. And I think there's some general confusion on the team about what our role is supposed to be. But I want to be able to tell my teammates that we're the good guys."

"And I'm concerned that we're radicalising McCree's crowd even further by hitting them this hard," said Heather. "Can't we just cut Dudley and Laliberté loose and pretend this whole thing never happened? Make it go away?"

"That's not my decision." Clarke faced the window, hands behind his back. "In war movies they often have scenes where someone steps on an anti-personnel mine and it just clicks -- it's supposed to only go off when the soldier takes his foot _off_ the mine. Doesn't exactly work like that in real life, but metaphorically, we've stepped on a Hollywood landmine now. Hand Dudley and Laliberté back, and we'll get slapped with a lawsuit courtesy of the McCrees' favourite attorney. Or we hold onto the detainees and see if the kid ruins his situation by himself. The X-Men are involved, so it'll be messy. They might come out of it looking like heroes, or they might cock it up just like they did with Jim McCree. That's a gamble, and I'm not a gambling man."

"Is a lawsuit the worst thing in the world?" said Jim. "Compared with people dying in a direct attack on that facility?"

Clarke shrugged. "Governments tend to prefer a few quiet deaths to one noisy lawsuit, but those aren't our only options. I'm not at liberty to talk about every angle, but this is a rapidly developing situation and I think we have every reason to be optimistic. Nobody has to die. The matter just needs some finesse."


	15. The Red and the White

_I met a lady, she was playing with her soldiers in the dark_  
_one by one she had to tell them_  
_that her name was Joan of Arc._  
_I was in that army, yes, I stayed a little while;_  
_I want to thank you, Joan of Arc,_  
_for treating me so well._  
_And though I wear a uniform I was not born to fight;_  
_all these wounded boys you lie beside,_  
_goodnight, my friends, goodnight._  
  
— Leonard Cohen

In and out of sleep. Paul couldn't tell the difference anymore. The room was dark, and his dreams were half-lit by a lambent green-gold light that slid from scene to scene, lingering just out of sight. It skimmed over dim horizons and flickered like summer heat lightning, or it drew close over his shoulder to cast long, distorted shadows. When he breached the surface of sleep enough to open his eyes (only for seconds at a time) he still couldn't think. His head hurt, and the chills from before had turned more intense: like nails on a chalkboard or chewing on aluminum foil, they were waves of some sick sensation that wasn't exactly pain, but still hurt somehow. But he kept slipping back down into sleep, or delirium -- it was like having a fever, that rapid channel-surfing of the brain, unable to settle on any one thought, any one dream. 

But he did keep dreaming of water. He was holding onto that much. Dark blue PBS documentary dreams of lightless depths, brain coral, anglerfish and snapping scallops, hushed voices. The shells, _coquilles St-Jacques_ , made him think of Joel and his head full of saints, all the strange old symbols. Scallop shells and staves sprouting lilies, the bloodless severed head of St-Denis, the twig sprouting a pair of eyes, the keys of heaven, the black dog running wild with a torch in its mouth, the ox and the straw. All that half-forgotten madness. 

He really might die here, he thought, but he couldn't think clearly enough to deal with the idea. These people who were pumping him full of weird drugs had no idea what they were doing, and if he died he'd just disappear, incinerated with the rest of the medical waste. In the dreams he could feel that final dissolution, as if he were one of those Pompeian columns of ash who just dispersed in a strong wind, every atom of his body flying apart from every other one, like a dandelion's puffball phase blowing its seeds everywhere. He tried to hold on, a ghost clinging to the ashes remaining, but he lost his grip and slipped away.

Then with a painful spasm he jerked awake again, shuddering, heart pounding. The green-gold light that tracked through the dreams was his own skin, the sallow bile colour of fear and pain. He wanted to curl up in the tank and just howl like a sick baby, scream until time ran backwards and his mother forgave him and he was back home safe. Alive.

It hadn't been this bad the first time. 

His mutation had manifested slowly, at first with a flaky desquamation, completely gross but painless. Malnutrition, his mother had said. Discoloured spots, dull and mostly purple-blue, appeared in weird places: the bottoms of his feet, between his shoulder-blades, the backs of his knees. Those had to be bruises, also from malnutrition. He was nauseated every day, out of school, lying on the couch with a mixing bowl on the floor beside him. Suffering from pica, he ate ice and paper. An Ayurvedic nutrition expert ordered him on a vegan diet, and then within a week the bruises started to bloom. 

That hadn't exactly been fun, but slow was better than fast. He'd been at home, with his family, even a couple of worried friends who stopped by every other day. Those friends had drifted away after the mutant thing was confirmed. In retrospect, Paul realised that they'd just been freaked out, no idea how to talk about it or look him in the eye. They might have got over it in time, but once you've avoided someone for a month you might as well keep it up rather than deal with the awkwardness of apologising. Sheltered high school kids made mistakes like that. Paul hadn't made it easy for them, either -- he hadn't done the smiley _hey guys I'm still me_ routine. No, he'd had a meltdown in front of his last faithful friend, and scared the guy off.

Why not have a meltdown here? Because one of the techs would come in and make him wish he'd stayed quiet. Some of them were mutants and some weren't, but the mutants were the ones to be scared of. Maybe they'd all been patients here too, once. Maybe they were brainwashed or maybe they just had the right personality for the job to begin with; they liked control.

And then Paul saw a faint trace of movement at the corner of his eye, no more noticeable than the floaters that crossed his vision when he looked at a blank wall. 

_It's not. It's not him. Don't start this or you'll drive yourself even more insane._

But the faint, colourless flicker of motion became more insistent, although it still didn't resolve into a human figure. It reminded him of the clouds of gnats that were the first harbingers of summer, hanging in the warm air over the sidewalk late in May. Definitely real, but not easy to see until you'd walked into them. "Joel?" he murmured, still slurred from sleep.

He felt a touch, could have sworn in court that he did, the familiar staticky feeling of overlapping Joel when he wasn't quite present, but not quite gone either. Then the presence was gone again.

_It's not him. Don't lie to yourself. You'll only make it worse._

* * *

Joel wanted to stay in the room and freak out over what they were doing to Paul, to touch him, or at least to tell him _I'm here, it'll be over soon_ , but if Weapon Plus had telepathic monitoring, they'd sense from Paul's mind that trouble was brewing. Better to blitz them suddenly.

He was using his ability in that oddly diffuse way that he'd stumbled on recently; it let him cover more of the facility faster, seeing things without being limited by looking in one direction at a time. 

He didn't like what he was seeing.

Obviously he hadn't expected to like it, but it was worse than Neurocherche by several orders of magnitude. At least the girls at Neurocherche were in ordinary hospital beds, no restraints, wearing clothes. Their families knew where they were. It was better than this.

Weapon Plus was walled inside and out, full of gates and turnstiles and keypads, bulletproof booths with bored but careful porters, uniforms and labcoats, buzzing fluorescent light on pale tile. Joel had drifted past them eight or ten times by now, noting the strategic details for Mr. Summers. They worked with the same empty efficiency as the staff at the safety centres: just another day at the office. But "the office" was isolated in northern Alberta, in a wilderness of mountains and black spruce, far from any but the smallest towns. The grounds were fenced in with barbed wire and guard towers, a few signs posted. **Property of the Government of Canada. Authorized personnel only. Trespassing is a felony.**

Joel had found a maintenance entrance which had just as many locks, but only one guard. Dr. Grey had telepathically persuaded the guard to open the door and then forget anything had happened. 

"You go in deep and find our targets," Mr. Summers had said to Joel. "Once you know the location, I'll send Faiza and Logan in to the spot. She can heal the targets if necessary so they can run, and she can freeze anyone who gives chase. Meanwhile Logan protects the non-combatants and draws fire if necessary to allow an escape. Jean will hold the exit and I'll run interference between to keep the route clear." 

Joel felt like he should have objected to his friends being labelled as _targets_ , but instead he found it reassuring: Mr. Summers had done things like this before, and he had his linguistic tricks to manage the stress of it, and that was good news. And neither Paul nor Prawn was going to get killed in the chaos, because Faiza was here and she could put them back together. Good team. This could work. It _would_ work. 

Faiza and Logan were advancing through the hallways, shrouded by a telepathic illusion: _maintenance crew, boring, no need to look, don't bother..._ Joel was immune to it, invisibly occupying the corridor and a few rooms, but he could see the tension in Faiza's shoulders and the bland unconcern on the faces of the staff who walked by. Logan was sniffing the air every few steps, but he looked preoccupied, a shuttered expression on his face. 

They had to help Prawn first, since he could take care of himself once Faiza got him fixed up. That was what Joel was hoping, anyway. At Prawn's door, Faiza looked up at nothing and whispered, "Ready for the Blitz?" 

Joel gathered himself back into his body on the other side of Prawn's door and opened it for them, then faded out again. They had to move quickly. The X-Men were so outnumbered it was a joke, and they had no idea whether Weapon Plus had their own mutant team -- or if so, what their powers were like. Stealth and speed were their best assets. 

Inside the room, Prawn was zonked out on the bed, bandages taped over both eyes, and another gauze dressing on his skull. Joel was enraged, but Faiza was even angrier. 

"Who do these bastards think they are, who gave them the right -- hey, Dudley, you awake, man? Remember me? Probably not just from my voice, sure. It's Dr. Hussain. Faiza." She bent over Prawn and took his hand in hers, and although her mouth was taut at the corners with cold fury, her voice was soft. "All right if I help you? I promise it won't hurt, not even as much as a flu shot. I don't even have to touch you. We're getting you out today, it's really happening." 

Prawn was sitting up straight now, his fists balled up in the folds of the sheet. He was looking in the direction of Faiza's voice, tendons standing out in his neck. "Christ, you're really -- people are coming for us? Who's here, who came--" 

"Joel and me and the X-Men. A few of them, anyway, bit of a skeleton crew. But that'll be fine once you're back in business. You didn't think we'd all leave you here forever, did you? Will you let me fix your eyes? I'm completely serious here, I won't if you say no," she said, although everyone was hoping Prawn would have the sense to say yes. _Hoping he's not already traumatised by this medical mangling._ "You've had more than enough of doctors treating you like an open buffet." 

A long pause, and then Prawn said, "Right, you're not like them." He sounded like he was trying to persuade himself. "Not that sort of doctor. That's good, that's okay. Do your thing." 

"You lot might not want to watch," Faiza said to Logan and the empty space of Joel's presence. "It looks a bit nasty." 

Logan shrugged, and Joel couldn't turn away without becoming tangible again, which he didn't want to do yet. If Weapon Plus had a telepath even as powerful as Kathleen was, Joel and Dr. Grey might be the only ones safe from the onslaught. 

"All right, suit yourselves." Faiza made a fist with her right hand, and a pale blue glow surrounded it, so bright and clean that Joel expected it to hum. But it didn't; the light was silent as she cast the glow over Prawn. She first removed the metal collar device from his neck, using the unnerving technique of neatly separating his head from his body first. Nothing bled, and the telekinetic cuts were impossibly straight and clean, each body part floating aside as she directed in order to find the pieces she was looking for. She sectioned his flesh and veins to remove the IV line from his arm, and briskly dispensed with the Foley catheter the same way. 

At that, Logan coughed and elected to turn around after all. 

Faiza still didn't touch Prawn, but she reached out like an orchestra conductor toward his temple, frowning as she concentrated. "Now what did they do with you?" she murmured to herself, and for a moment she let her eyes slip closed. "Looks like...some sort of retinoplastic surgery, anyway, which -- for the peanut gallery -- is absolutely _not_ indicated for a patient with perfectly functional vision. Who didn't bloody consent to the procedure. These people are butchers. Let me adjust this..." 

It only took a few moments, and then Prawn was frantically tearing away the tape and gauze, and his eyes watering profusely as he blinked. But the incisions had healed over without a single thread of scar tissue, and Joel realised he was weeping from relief. "Holy fuck, you did it, I didn't feel a thing -- I could kiss you," Prawn said, his voice cracked but warm. "If I were allowed. God. Thank you." 

Faiza flashed him her brilliant grin, but it was brief. "Mate, you're with the NHS now. How you feeling, good to stand up? Give it a go, Logan will give you an arm if you need it. Joel -- um, where are you?" 

Joel made himself visible enough that she could look him in the eye. "We should keep that thing they had around Prawn's neck, I think. Dr. McCoy or somebody might be interested." 

"Oh, that's evidence, that's coming with us," said Faiza, zipping the metal collar into the pocket of her jacket. "On we go to see Paul, then?" 

"Let's move it," Logan said. "This guy's good to go." 

Prawn was indeed steady on his feet as they left the room, his doubled hospital gowns flapping at his sides. He was breathing hard, from overwhelming emotion rather than physical distress, and he said darkly, "I suppose you don't want me to fucking microwave every flatscan in this place, right?" 

"Not even if they deserve it," said Joel, who thought a lot of them probably did deserve it. "Sorry, man." 

"Paul's not doing so well -- you seen him?" 

"I've seen him." It was tight. "I don't know how much Faiza can do--" 

"Hey." Logan spoke quietly, more so than Joel would have expected from him. It wasn't a pity voice, or a _get it together, wimp_ voice; he just sounded reasonable. "Sooner we get out, sooner you get to go home. Show us where your boy is." 

Joel nodded and disappeared again. He left a faint trace behind, like the wobble of hot air over a baking highway in the summer, so subtle that Logan was the only one who could make it out with his unnaturally sharp vision: they'd practiced on the flight over. 

He was thinking of Kyle Gibney, wherever he was locked up. Mr. Summers had nixed the idea of going after him. "Two is pushing it. Three runs the risk of getting ourselves into real trouble, especially if he's being held in another part of the place. I feel bad but we can't do everything at once. How well do you know this guy?" 

Not that well, Joel had to admit. Kyle used to come by the house at irregular intervals, when he wasn't in safety. He showered and ate there, but didn't speak much. He was half-feral, easily tripped over into rage, and Ox (as the unofficial bouncer of St-Jean-de-Dieu) sometimes had to escort him off the property. Joel knew a few things about him: he was from Vancouver, had been in a few institutions, no relationship left with his family, no friends, afraid of doctors. That was it. 

It made him wonder how many other people he knew were locked up in this place. Just like with the boys on the Four West ward at Neurocherche, he was going to get stuck in a situation where he couldn't whisk everyone away to safety. He passed by and through doorway after doorway without unlocking any of them, and each one weighed on his conscience. Prawn could have slammed the facility with another EMP, and arguably it would have done less collateral damage than the one in Repentigny, but they were in the wilderness in the dead of winter. The Blackbird couldn't hold everybody. 

More than that, though, Joel didn't want the computers here to get fried. If the leak to the _Citizen_ got any political results, that data would be very important. 

Still, as he reached Paul's door he was thinking of the words of Dorothy Day: _We cannot live alone. We cannot go to Heaven alone. Otherwise, God will say to us, "Where are the others?"_

Maybe he could come back, even without the X-Men's help. Maybe he could scrape together a team of the willing, from the mutants at the house who wanted to take action. Maybe little by little they could clean all these prisons out. 

He moved through the closed door of Paul's room and opened it for the others, then went to the tank, taking off his jacket to drape it over Paul's midsection, to let him have a scrap of dignity. "I'm here, I'm here, Paul, it's me -- I'm so sorry, I'm sorry, but we're getting you out..." 

Paul was a dull, pale celadon green, the colour of algae that covered the surfaces of stagnant ponds. He gleamed in the dark, the light refracted and reflected by the ripples in the tank, but his light was still dimmer than it should have been, weak and turbid. His eyes were dull too, but reddened with tears. "You're not here, it's another fucking dream--" 

"I'm really here, Paul. You're awake. Feel me." Joel reached under the water (warm as a bath) to touch his hand. Paul's skin was beaded all over with hard, tiny lumps, sandpapery to the touch. A few threads of blood escaped into the water from lesions on his wrists, places where the restraints had rubbed him raw. "Faiza's here with me, she's going to help you. She already fixed Prawn, see? And the X-Men are here, they'll get us all out." 

"You've got friends in high places," Faiza said with a wan smile, stepping forward. "Just say the word and I'll get you on your feet." 

"I don't even know what they've been doing to me," Paul mumbled. His fingers latched onto Joel's in the water. "Please, yes, if you're real then get me the fuck out of here." 

"Okay. Close your eyes. This won't hurt but you won't want to watch, either." The neon-blue flare of Faiza's power lit the room, and she went to work. She sliced Paul's hands and feet off in order to free him from the restraints, knitting bones and flesh back afterward and healing the raw skin on his wrists and ankles. She cut him free from the feeding tube, the needles, and the catheter, and smoothed away some pressure sores that had been eating away at his hips and spine. 

But then she paused, frowning, her hands raised alight with the St. Elmo's fire of her power. "I'm not sure...what they've been doing, I'm not sure it's..." 

"What?" said Joel. 

"I can't heal that," Faiza said softly, the blue light dying away. "The rest of it is how his mutation should have been." 

"What do you mean--" 

Faiza ignored him, addressing Paul. "Listen, I'll need more time to figure this out, and time we have not got. Can you run, as you are? Does anything else hurt?" 

Paul had clambered out of the tank, still holding Joel's jacket around himself, a tough manoeuvre. "Just get me out of here," he said, flushed a deep purple of humiliation, but the colour was bright again and his eyes had cleared. "Just get us all the fuck out of here, please, please..." 

"Here, take one of mine," Prawn said, untying one of his hospital gowns and handing it over. "Better we both show a little skin than you having to give them full frontal." 

Joel helped Paul put the hospital gown on and then drew him into a tight embrace, desperate and scared, his cheek against Paul's wet hair. "I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm sorry they did this, I love you, _je t'aime plus que tout_..." 

Paul seemed afraid to hold on too tightly, as if he would lose this too, but he whispered back, " _J't'aime aussi, Joël._ " 

"We gotta move," Logan said from the doorway. "If you guys can run. Security goons headed this way." 

"Can you draw them off track?" said Faiza, wincing a little. "Sorry to volunteer you for the hard part, but--" 

"Don't worry about it, darlin'," said Logan, as he eased the door open. "This is what I'm good at." 

And he slipped out first. Joel faded out and passed through the wall to check the scene: alarms had been going off for a few minutes now, and there were loud footbeats through the corridors. That probably meant some exits would be sealed off, but that wouldn't stop Logan. 

Or Mr. Summers -- red light lanced through the doors at the end of the hall, smashing the glass and knocking the metal portals off their hinges in a pile of twisted metal. 

"Okay, Logan's keeping them busy, let's go," Joel said. He was still visible because it seemed like the jig was up, but it definitely wasn't healthy to be tangible just yet. 

Faiza and Joel went first, with Prawn and Paul in the rear, running through the corridors of Weapon Plus. They could hear gunfire behind them, or the others could; Joel was somehow aware of the noise on an intellectual level without actually feeling the crack of the soundwaves hitting his eardrums, or the deafness and tinnitus afterward. 

_God will say to us, "Where are the others?"_

At Neurocherche, they'd done everything possible. Joel believed Kathleen and Mars that the boys were simply too far gone to be saved; they were telepaths and he wasn't, and they had knowledge that he didn't have. But that wasn't the case here. There were hundreds of prisoners being abused in this place and it was wrong to leave them here. At the absolute, abject minimum, they should try to find Kyle. They knew Kyle personally and Aurora had wanted to help him. 

Well, it wasn't really "they." Paul and Prawn had been through enough and no more could be asked of them, but as far as Joel could see, his own duty was clear. 

He dropped further into physicality and said to Faiza, "Can you find the exit?" 

"What?" She had to yell over the ringing in her ears. "You're meant to show us--" 

"I'm saying can you find your way out -- if it's no then it's no, but there's someone else still stuck here. Like I was saying on the plane." 

"And like Cyclops was saying on the plane, there's no time," Faiza snapped. 

"What the _fuck_ is wrong with you?" Paul exploded. "Are you that fucking determined to push it until we get caught? Just _go._ " 

"They've got Kyle Gibney here in a cage like an animal, all right?" Joel said. "I can't get everyone but I can get someone we know, someone who was a guest under my goddamn roof. You can go, I'll catch up with you." 

"No! I'm not letting you split off, because I'll never see you again, you stupid piece of shit!" Paul was furious indigo shot through with yellow. "Stick to the plan or they'll fucking kill us." 

"Steady on," Faiza broke in. "And keep moving, we can fight and run at the same time. Joel, I have to take Paul's side here. Cyclops won't be pleased if you throw a spanner in his plans." 

She was right, but Joel ignored that point. "They can't do anything to me and you're with Faiza and Prawn," he said to Paul. "They're strong, you'll be okay." 

"What if we're not? Is your saintly martyr act worth that?" 

_"It's not a fucking act."_ Strange that it would be Paul who pushed him over the edge today, but then Paul had always been good at needling. "And you know that, after five years you damn well know it. I have to go. I'm not being a martyr because there's nothing they can do to me. I'll be back. That's it." 

Logan had sprinted back from the other corridor and was displeased to see the team arguing. "What the hell is the big hold-up here? _Move it_." 

"Give me thirty seconds to look for the guy I mentioned on the plane," Joel said, banking everything on his guess that Logan would be willing to defy Mr. Summers just for the sake of it. "If you can get a cage open we can bring him home, no matter what Mr. Summers said." 

"Ah, Jesus. Thirty seconds, kid?" From Logan's expression, the idea must have had some appeal. "You can find your guy that fast?" 

Joel shrugged. "Just watch me." 

Immediately, he loosed himself from his body and sank down through the lower floors of Weapon Plus, spread out like fog. It _was_ fast; the habits of physicality slowed him down more than anything, the mistaken belief that he had to walk anywhere or process information with a brain made of meat. The barrier was fear -- fear of overloading himself somehow, fear of dissolving so completely that he couldn't get himself back. 

Sheer necessity pushed him through the fear and the world itself seemed to change. All these walls, doors, borders, cameras, and guards were pointless. They were the Maginot Line, or children playing statues, a series of limitations and agreements that everyone took very seriously, and they were nothing. He wondered why he'd spent so much time indulging these ideas; he knew that he was some sort of enthusiastic proponent of nations and walls and doors, but his reasons for it felt distant and unintelligible now. 

In any case, it was trivial to find the cages. No muscles to tire, no feet to get sore, no need to look at things one after the other, just an effort of concentration, searching. The basement went very deep, six levels down. The lowest levels were labs and equipment, but on the third basement level the air resonated with the bell-clangs of claws against metal grates. Snarls, whines, the yipping of dogs in kennels, and human sobbing. 

The cage was labelled; otherwise Joel wouldn't have recognised Kyle at all. His hair was gone, even his eyebrows and lashes, huddled like Nosferatu in a soiled corner of the cage. It was Kyle's same old posture, hunched forward in a crouch, knees up, the same way he used to sit in front of the TV at St-Jean-de-Dieu. 

Joel became substantial enough to tap the cage lightly, not surprised when Kyle jerked and lunged for the source of the sound, fangs snapping. But when he smelled nothing, Kyle backed away, confused. 

"Your friend Aurora said I'd find you here," Joel said. The other prisoners were baying too now. "We were in the neighbourhood. You remember, right? The house on Rue Sainte Famille?" 

Kyle only hissed, and Joel wondered whether he was another one like the boys in Neurocherche, too ravaged to even be able to speak in his own defence. 

But the claws clinked again against the bars of the cage, and he licked his lips and said hoarsely, "Aurora remembered?" 

"Yeah, man, she didn't forget you. Neither did we. Give me a minute to get help, okay?" He judged that he had about three seconds left; talking to Kyle had taken longer than finding him. 

Above, he found Logan in a strategic retreat (or "hiding", whichever) in a maintenance closet, and materialised suddenly enough to startle him. "Well, you weren't kidding," Logan said with a raised eyebrow. "Find him?" 

"Yup. Third basement level, northeastern corner. Faiza's got Paul and Prawn?" 

"Yeah, she does. You're abso-fuckin-lutely sure you don't want to go with them?" 

"I told him I was bringing help, so I can't really punk out now." 

Logan ran a hand back through his hair and cracked his neck with a metallic pop. "You're using me as a pair of human bolt-cutters, kid, but I'll tell you why I'm doing this: I don't like cages. And I don't like this place." 

"Those are good reasons." 

"You have no damn idea just how good they are." Logan took a short breath and let it out. "I'm gonna get shot a few more times, this'll be fun. Fine, do your thing, let's find this poor bastard." 

"Sorry." Joel disappeared again and passed through the door as Logan kicked it open, popping his claws. _Snikt._

There were a dozen armed security guards in the hallway, arrayed in a semi-circle, and they opened fire. The bullets whistled straight through Joel, long lines of steel, and although blood-spray fanned out where they grazed and struck Logan, they didn't stop him either. That was enough to scatter the guards as Logan rampaged toward them, the silver-gleaming claws bright under the harsh fluorescent lights. None of them risked it -- it was another day at the office, and they didn't want to die for this job. 

Automated doors slammed shut in front of them, and Logan simply slammed his fists through the safety glass, exposing metal bones that swiftly covered themselves with flesh again, claws shearing through wires and locks. He was roaring, and Joel's main worry was that he wasn't actually as berserk as he seemed -- that it was pain as well as battle fury, that he had to keep roaring and snarling just to feel brave enough to keep running toward the pain. 

Joel's father had taught him to play chess on a set of Isle of Lewis pieces. Heavy stone chessmen, each thickset and rather conical, carved with wide-staring eyes. The knights rode diminutive Celtic horses, the bishop bearing a curly crook, the king enthroned with his scabbarded sword across his lap and the queen with her cheek upon her hand in repose. The rooks were wild-eyed berserkers biting their shields, and Joel's father had told him about the myths of warriors who fought that way, unharmed by fire or iron, fighting without armour. The monstrous warp-spasms of Cuchulainn. Joel had never learned how to be very good at chess, but the stories had stayed with him. 

Thus he felt a mingled respect, pity, and guilt at seeing this man, little better than a stranger, tearing through locked doors and putting armed guards to flight -- probably exactly like Cuchulainn, really -- and suffering all the way. Because he hated cages. 

They barrelled down the fire stairs to the third basement level, but when they reached the cages, Logan stilled in the dark, breathing hard but all the gunshot wounds healed over to nothing. His nostrils flared, taking in the smell of the place, the musk of unwashed bodies and the urine spray of feral mutants desperate to claim their small territories for their own. He swallowed back bile and said aloud, "Kid. Get back here." 

Joel materialised again, most of the way. "It's the far row." 

"Yeah, fine, but I want you to really stand here with me. Take a deep breath. You can't smell what I smell, but it's bad enough, ain't it?" Logan slapped him lightly on the shoulder, not jovially but to make sure he was present enough to feel it. "You soak this in." 

Joel didn't ask why. He knew. The mutants locked up like this were the last ones who would ever get justice, at the very end of the queue. They were ugly, they were dangerous, and it was too easy to dismiss them as less than human. Even the most alien-looking mutants at his house, if they were at least gentle, could win more respect and acceptance than these prisoners could. He took in the smell, the nauseating stink that no one would tolerate in a farm or a zoo or a puppy mill. The noise, never any silence, never any daylight, not even an overhead light turned on for them. 

Logan popped both sets of claws again and strode down the length of the rows of cages, shearing the bars apart with a screech that drowned out all the other howls and snarls of the prisoners. He didn't look at who he was freeing, and he didn't stop at Kyle's cage either. "We can't take 'em all with us," he said. "But we can let 'em have a fighting chance." 

The prisoners were forcing open the clipped bars of their cages, some of them busting out with ease and some of them struggling. Some bounded out the doors without a glance back, and some stayed to open the way for the weaker ones. 

And some of them, Joel knew, were probably going to rip open a few throats on their way out, and some of them were going to get shot down. The operation was going to get bloody, due to a decision he himself had made, when otherwise they could have got away clean. But he couldn't control what the prisoners did, and he couldn't control what the guards did, and Logan was right: it was better to give them some small chance of escape than to leave them caged. 

The din was so deafening that Joel retreated back to intangibility, but just as he did, the horde of escaping prisoners slowed to a halt. It wasn't Faiza freezing them in their tracks; rather they just seemed to suddenly have second thoughts about bursting out of the basement in a blind rage. That had to be Dr. Grey, but if so it was astonishing -- this was power on a level with the Professor. Maybe greater. 

Logan shook his head. "Nice one, Red," he murmured to himself with a private smile, then elbowed his way through the crowd of placid prisoners. "All right, kid, you got a hat trick this time and all three of your friends are alive. Light a goddamn candle to the patron saint of fuckups when you get home." 

"I plan to." Joel followed with Kyle at his side, and he thought of all the saints he could thank for this: St. Jude, of course, the miracle-working saint of lost causes; Joan of Arc, the war heroine who never killed anyone; Dorothy Day, not yet canonised but surely a saint; Joseph Cafasso, the priest of the gallows and the patron of prisoners...there was no official patron saint for mutants, a lacuna that he'd always resented a bit. _Give the Vatican a minute,_ his father used to say. _They'll pull someone out of the vault and dust him off, put him on the job. Until then just ask Our Lady, I guess._

"We're not out yet," Kyle muttered grimly. He had loped along with an uneven, worrying stride at first, but he seemed to have something like Logan's healing factor and was shaking it off. 

The crowd of prisoners were still wandering in a benign haze, as if they were in a shopping mall, and maybe also on Oxycontin. "If Dr. Grey's doing this, why didn't she stop the guards from the beginning?" Joel said. 

Logan shrugged. "Maybe she didn't know she could." 

Maybe. When they reached the ground floor again, the staff were all perambulating with the same blissed out expressions, sleepy and sweet, rifles carelessly dropped. Dr. Grey could have handled the whole facility by herself, Joel thought. The only possible reaction to that was awe. 

They walked through the corridors that were streaked and smeared with Logan's blood, past doctors and security staff who were eerily calm, some of them even making small talk as if they were waiting for a bus. _Plans for the weekend?_

Then one woman, middle-aged with short greying brown hair and glasses, turned her head to look straight at Logan. She recognised him, and she said pleasantly, "Good morning, Weapon X." 

Whatever that meant, it triggered something in Logan. What happened next took less than three seconds, but Joel saw it unfold with a terrible, irresistible slowness. The colour drained from Logan's face, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. The claws popped -- _snikt_ \-- and he launched himself at the woman. 

She didn't fight back, and she couldn't have. In one swipe, he had her cut open from her throat to her belly, arterial scarlet spraying everyone in the hallway. She didn't even have time to scream. 

The artificial calm broke; Dr. Grey must have been just as shocked as everyone else. The woman was sprawled on the floor in a pool of her own blood, and Joel decided that (in Mr. Summers' phrase) they might as well roll the dice on an untested method. 

He was instantly spattered and soaked with the blood when he became physical again, in danger of getting sliced by Logan's claws himself, but he reached for the woman's gore-slicked hand. Faiza and Dr. Grey were two corridors away at the exit, with Paul and Prawn and Mr. Summers, waiting to rendezvous. It wasn't far on foot and it would be no time at all via the Aphanes, but Joel had to pull this complete stranger in with him. All he could do was meet her eyes (glassy with terror), read the name on her ID badge (Dr. Carol Hines), and hope that was enough. 

Dr. Carol Hines was a human being. She was not a shoe or an index card or a crumpled bus transfer or any of the other things that Joel ordinarily dragged along with him into the whiteness. She wasn't Paul, either, and he hadn't spent years sleeping in the same room with her, listening to the tidal sound of her breathing, stepping into the shower steam she left in the bathroom in the mornings. Maybe someone else had. Maybe nobody else knew those things about her, and she lived alone. She was trying to scream with a few bubbling breaths. She didn't have to die. 

_Remember O most gracious Virgin Mary_

Joel pulled her into the emptiness. 

_that never was it known_

The whiteness was red. 

_that anyone who fled to your protection_

Red, the red darkness of a chamber of the heart. The snowblind emptiness was suffused with pain, loud with the bubbling scream that Carol Hines couldn't let out. 

_implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided--_

It was easy to gather her together again. She was the pain, and he was not. He'd gone through this whole sorry day without getting so much as a bruise. He had that luxury. She was dying and he was not. He was the white, and she was the red. 

The two of them fell back into physical form, one last screech of pain raking through Joel's mind as he separated her from himself, at Faiza's feet. "Help," was all he could say. 

Faiza's dark skin went ashen, but she'd been trained in emergency medicine -- patients didn't usually drop at her feet in quite such a literal sense, but she knew how to react quickly. "Okay -- okay, okay, don't die, don't die, please don't, I've got you..." 

In the neon blue glow from her hands, the jagged gashes sealed themselves up, the organs looking less like hamburger and more like an anatomy lesson, shattered ribs repairing themselves, the rags of flesh forming whole muscles again, and lastly her skin closed over it all, colour warming again as Faiza replaced her blood. 

Carol Hines opened her eyes. She'd lost her glasses and she was still soaked with her own blood, and she gulped back a curdled, clabbering scream as she scrambled to her feet and ran back through the hall. She was blind with terror, but she was alive. 

"Oh, Allahu Akbar," Faiza breathed, swaying on her feet. Dr. Grey steadied her with a hand on her elbow. "Oh, Allahu Akbar." 

"Jesus Mary and Joseph," Joel said, feeling just about as sick. 

Logan sleepwalked back to them, claws dripping blood, his eyes dark. 

"What in God's name did you do that for?" Mr. Summers demanded. "I told you this was a no-kill operation--" 

"I was here before." Logan avoided the gaze of Dr. Grey. "Maybe not here, maybe it was the same bunch operating someplace else, but these people knew me. This is what I was trying to remember." 

"We should go," said Dr. Grey, after a slight pause. "The Professor can help you piece together the memories later." 

Logan shook his head. "This is something I gotta figure out on my own. But get the kids home, yeah." 

For a moment it looked like Mr. Summers was going to start an argument, but he went for the door. "Fine. I'll be glad to be done with--" 

There was a crowd outside the door and he automatically reached up for the switch on his visor, but as they came out into the light they saw that it was a much bigger situation than just a few more Weapon Plus guards. 

Two choppers hovered in the evening sky, aiming bright halogen beams at the ground, and people had swarmed through the open gates to stand in the yard around the facility: military in green camo, Jeeps and trucks, civilians with cameras, news vans. CTV and CBC, their familiar primary-colour logos bright against the snowy gloom. Mr. Summers stopped in his tracks, dumbfounded, and so did the others. 

The flashbulbs went off, like lightning in a cloud as seen from the window of a plane, cameras everywhere clicking their shutters as the newspeople surged forward. 

"Will media personnel please keep _back_ from the scene, thank you," crackled some officer's voice over a megaphone, but the crowd of reporters only drew back a little, barking questions. 

"Is it true the PM personally invited the X-Men to--" 

"What's the role of British mutant agents in--" 

"Do you have any information on the leak to--" 

"What happened inside Weapon Plus?" 

Joel heard a strange shuffling, clicking sound beside him, like an old-fashioned split-flap display on a railway station's departures board, or maybe more like a rattlesnake: _k-k-k-k-k-klik_. It was Paul: the tiny hard lumps on his skin had burst open to reveal thousands of what first appeared to be spines, but row by row they flattened against his body. Hard, chitinous scales, with the same iridescent shimmer as a beetle's wing or the inside of a clamshell, flashing green and gold in the light of the fading sky. 

The megaphone crackled again. "Everybody, I'm gonna have to ask you again to please move back. X-Men, Dr. Hussain, Mr. McCree, M. Laliberté, and...others...please follow these two soldiers on your left, thank you, while we secure the area, thank you. You are not under arrest, Canadian Forces are here to help, thank you." 

He repeated it in French. 

Dr. Grey gave a tiny nod. "He means it," she murmured. Her eyes were almost gold in the blue winter dusk. "They don't have any orders to hurt us." 

"What the hell is going on," Mr. Summers muttered, though it was clear from his tone that he didn't expect to be so lucky as to get an answer. "These vultures better be staying away from the Blackbird." 

The two soldiers came to herd them away from the doors of Weapon Plus, across the yard to the gated wall while the media disobeyed the order and swarmed them from every direction, like a scrum in Parliament. 

"How did you learn the location of this terrorist base?" 

"What went on inside the walls of Weapon Plus?" 

"Mr. McCree, whose blood is that?" 

Paul was trembling so hard he could barely walk upright, and Joel held onto his arm even though he didn't feel much steadier. The scales were dry and smooth, and they blocked out the light of his skin. 

The soldiers were trying to wave the reporters away, without much success, and finally Joel had to clear his throat. "Excuse me, but my friends are barefoot in hospital gowns, and it's January in northern Alberta. I'll answer questions later, but I know less than you think. Please let us pass." 

The crowd parted, cameras still firing off blinding flashes, and the soldiers surged back through the gate to the doors of Weapon Plus. As they passed the officer who'd wielded the megaphone earlier, they heard him addressing one persistent reporter: " _No_ , ma'am, as I said, the Canadian government has never supported this organisation. Canada strongly, ah, deplores the abuses of human rights that, ah, that it seems they may have taken place. This is allegedly as of this moment, we are investigating -- we will be investigating much more in days to come, thank you. No further questions, thank you." 


	16. Interlude: Point Counter Point

**Canadians deserve the truth on mutant rights abuses**  
by Veronica Geier, _Ottawa Citizen_

Reports are trickling in from Weapon Plus in northwestern Alberta, and the debate is raging across Canada: what did the government know, and when did they know it? 

Prime Minister David Turcott claims that Weapon Plus was operating under false auspices, using signage that mimicked the federal government's styles and pretending to an association with the National Mutant Research Centre, a wholly benign organization. (Indeed, if we take the government at its word, the National Mutant Research Centre doesn't seem to do anything at all to justify its existence.) This chicanery allowed Weapon Plus to hoodwink civilian clinics and researchers as well, and the gulled but innocent men and women of science sent their patients on to Weapon Plus when conventional treatments failed. Result: unfettered access to mutants, to be used as guinea pigs. Profit.

Documents leaked to the _Citizen_ from Neurocherche tell a very different story. It's a simpler story, and much more likely to be true. In this tale, there were no innocents. The scientists at Neurocherche actively participated in dehumanizing their patients, or they at least turned a blind eye. They used telepathic young women as spies and sold the information to the government of Canada. They threatened patients who would not comply, and used a psychotropic serum to force the girls to talk. Evidently, this serum was itself derived from the spinal fluid of another mutant child, known only as Patient 143. When "treatment" failed, Neurocherche sent their patients to Weapon Plus, and yes, that name is attested in the files. They knew.

On Sunday, the photo of the emerging survivors went viral. The photograph shows four confirmed superheroes, the American X-Men in black leather and Britain's Faiza Hussain in her white hijab. The other four are just people: two haggard survivors whose names have not yet been released, and Montréal activist Joel McCree, covered in blood and supporting his partner Paul Laliberté in his arms. In about a week, when people are tired of the picture clogging their Facebook feeds, the government will supply us with reasons why we shouldn't care about these people. The Americans weren't invited. The Brits were overreaching. Mr. McCree and M. Laliberté are religious radicals, and it's certainly unsavoury to see a noted pacifist drenched in somebody else's blood.

I can't force you to care about these people as individuals. That's your business. But you should care if you're being lied to, and you are.

Mr. Turcott wants to convince us that Weapon Plus and its malcontents are all a bunch of criminals, to greater and lesser degrees, an exception to an otherwise orderly and just regime. Further, he wants you to believe that his government is handling the situation appropriately.

Well, Mr. Turcott is lying. Even without the leak, we have thousands of safety centres in this country to prove him wrong. We have a nationwide registry for our own citizens. We have endless news reports from the last five years of mutants who were arrested for nothing. We have a word in the English language for systematic, lethal persecution of a minority population, and that word is genocide. The only criminals in this story are the members of Parliament who voted for it.

To give the devil his due, the government is (now) falling all over itself to help its victims. The Army freed hundreds of mutants when they entered the facility. It's the right thing to do, but it's also a cynical move -- with the leak of the Neurocherche documents implicating Ottawa in the medical abuse of mutants, Turcott's Tories have decided to blow with the wind. Like Sergeant Schultz on _Hogan's Heroes_ , the PM claims he knew nothing. Well, nothing except the many Parliamentary measures that whittled away mutant rights in this country on his watch. His claims of guiltless ignorance are an insult to the Canadian people's intelligence, and a cowardly attempt to duck responsibility. 

With the zeal of the newly-converted, Turcott has announced an inquiry into the Weapon Plus affair. So he should. But we must go further: Canada needs a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to assess and heal the hurt done to our mutant population. We waited far too long before facing the truth of how we made First Nations people suffer in this country, and we should not wait until decades go by before we address this injustice.

But who am I kidding? Of course we will.

Nevertheless, the press will not allow Turcott to rewrite history as he pleases. The _Citizen_ will continue to report on the content of the Neurocherche leak, and we eagerly anticipate this planned inquiry -- I'm salivating at the thought. Truth will out.

* * *

**A complex legacy of justice for mutants in Canada**  
by Christopher Thorold, _National Post_

When my father died twenty years ago, he left me his 1988 Honda Civic. It was an old clunker, but I was young and glad to have it. Still, it was his car -- he chose it, he worked to pay for it, he put mileage on it, he got that dent in the door when he was T-boned at an intersection. His car, but now I was behind the wheel. 

No one earns an inheritance, but what we do with the things that come to us says a lot about who we are.

Conservative Prime Minister David Turcott inherited a legacy of hate from his Liberal predecessor, Tom Sherbrooke. Under Sherbrooke's mandate, the Gatineau Accords were forged and ratified by a population galvanized by fear, in the wake of a political murder. Turcott, an intelligent and compassionate leader, has made the best of a bad hand, striving to balance public safety with individual freedoms. The compromise has not always been happy, but mutants have always had legal recourse in this country. 

No one knows this better than Joel McCree, who personally paid the bail for a whopping 358 safety centre detainees over the last five years. He's paid legal bills and referred clients to his uncle, Montreal attorney Martin McCree, so that mutants could have their day in court. Surely he must understand that the legal system is open to mutants. 

McCree also had the opportunity to use his mutant abilities on the side of law and order -- RCMP sources tell me that he was courted years ago, and that he turned the offer down for ideological reasons. He was also approached by the nascent Alpha Flight, a worthy idea that seems to be foundering under poor management. 

The opportunity to help others is one of the highest and most gratifying privileges of wealth and power. It is McCree's prerogative to accept or reject these opportunities. That is his gift and his right. But no amount of family money, soft political influence, or mutant abilities will ever give him the right to dictate policy for everyone else. Turcott has a mandate from the Canadian people, and his government has made its own difficult, painful decisions about the mutant issue. Those are effectively our decisions, if we are voters. No single individual has the right to take those decisions away from us.

That includes safety centres, CRIM cards, and the muddled mess of Alpha Flight. It may or may not include the National Mutant Research Centre.

At this point it's nothing more than reading tea-leaves to offer an opinion about Weapon Plus; we simply don't know who's telling the truth yet. I'm inclined to credit Turcott's account that Weapon Plus were opportunistic and monstrously unethical experimenters (they do not deserve the epithet of "scientists") who merely posed as a government operation. If that turns out to be true, then McCree bears less blame for his actions. Perhaps he even deserves praise. But that is not the story McCree's defenders are telling, which for me is the crucial point: they claim that Weapon Plus operated with the blessing of an elected government of Canada, and that the St-Jean-de-Dieu group decided to trespass on their grounds and interfere with their staff. If true, this is a serious crime against their own country. 

McCree has not yet delivered a detailed statement, of course, and it may be that many things will be clarified when he does. It may seem churlish to criticize such a young man, and yes, his philanthropy is commendable. I'm more than willing to admit that if my father had left me assets in seven digits, instead of a junky old Honda, I probably wouldn't spend that money on other people's legal bills. But there are little plaques and stones all over Montreal and Ottawa engraved with the names of Joel McCree's forefathers, commemorating a family legacy of citizenship and generosity. As an average guy whose ancestral Honda is now in the junkyard, I'm glad that those who can give still do give. I hope this spirit lives on for future generations, instead of becoming twisted by anger and entitlement. I have hopes for the spirit of democracy too. The sins of the fathers are visited on the children, but so are their virtues.


	17. It Depends

_Late-breaking story on the CBC_  
_A nation whispers, "We always knew that he'd go free."_  
_They add, "You can't be fond of living in the past,_  
_'Cause if you are then there's no way that you're gonna last."_  
  
— The Tragically Hip, "Wheat Kings"

Paul's scales were as responsive as his photophores: they retracted when he relaxed, sliding back under the skin, or bristled out again when he was startled. They didn't hurt, he said. He was too shocked to say more than that on the flight home, his exposed skin pale, clear, and colourless -- only speckled now and then by drifts of fine dots in iron-oxide brown, the colour of dried blood. Joel sat with him, shutting up after the first dozen apologies, and Faiza sat on his other side. The blue glow of her power shone dimly around her folded hands as she sat with eyes half-closed, now and then murmuring medical terminology to herself.

"Like I was saying before, I'm not a surgeon," she said after an hour of this. "Something just...speaks to me, somehow. I know what to do without knowing how I know. When someone's really banged up, it's easier -- then it's loud, obvious how to fix them. When they're stable, knowledge seeps in very quietly, you know? --Like with you," she said, nodding to Joel. "I wouldn't try to slice your brain apart to stop the seizures, because my sense of what's wrong there is too subtle. It's old, it's healed over. The brain is very plastic and it learns to work around any damaged spot. So I could miss some nuance, make it worse. It might take me weeks or months of fine-tuning, and maybe I'd never repair it exactly right."

"I wasn't expecting you to," Joel said.

"No, but you might have wondered. I would, if it were me." Faiza shrugged. "With you, Paul...I don't feel that wrongness at all, to start with. I can eliminate the drugs from your bloodstream -- have done, already -- but your DNA does code for the anatomical structures of the scales. I hate to say so, but I think their guess was correct, that adolescent malnutrition kept the physical mutation from fully expressing itself. And it does make sense for your body to have some protection like that, considering how sensitive and fragile your skin is."

"Yeah," Paul said, breaking his long silence. He wasn't meeting anybody's eyes, staring blankly at a spot on the bulkhead while Faiza spoke, but his voice held a bitter edge. "Yeah, this is just gonna be so handy."

Faiza didn't try to argue or pacify him. The blue glow faded from around her hands. "What they did was wrong. Full stop. It was a violation on so many levels. Did I sound like I was excusing it, just now?"

"No. You just sounded very scientific," Paul said, with the same distant tone.

"Then I'm sorry. I really, really am. I wish I could help more."

"You've been completely amazing," Joel said. Faiza deserved more tact than that, and it wasn't Paul's fault that he couldn't provide it, so someone else had to. "You made it possible to help a lot of people, you and Will both. I'm just -- you did a lot more than you had to do and if that gets you in trouble with your boss--"

"Oh, don't worry about the Director," said Faiza, sitting back in her seat with a bit of sag to the movement, obviously more exhausted than she wanted to let on. "He might be put off that I wasn't around HQ if he needed me for something, but he's really a good sort. He'll be pleased that we were doing the right thing, even if he keeps it to himself and just makes cynical jokes. Or that's what I think about him, at least. Anyway," she added more practically, "we went to bat for a British subject, and everyone else was a convenient bonus. Or that's what we'll say on paper."

"Is it too late for us to be British subjects too?" Joel said with a bit of bleak humour. "No extradition treaty with the U.K."

"Dunno. D'you have a British grandparent or something? What would your dad say? 'It depends.'" Faiza gave him a half smile. "Doctors like that answer too, not just lawyers."

"It's a great first answer, it always buys you some time." As stupid as it now seemed, Joel had had time to pack a bag before they left Montreal: just an IGA shopping bag with his meds and Paul's, and a couple of sandwiches that Arlette had made. Hadn't thought to bring a change of clothes for either himself or Paul. _You never pack enough,_ his mother's old complaint when he came home from New York. _You never think ahead._ Now his shirt was stiff with Dr. Hines' blood, and his arms were flaked with it. He got his clonazepam out and popped the lid to dispense a couple of tablets, resisting the urge to offer Paul one when Faiza was right there to catch them. Instead he went through Paul's prescription bottles to find his anxiety med, the Ativan. "'It depends' just gives you a second to think. And it's always true."

"Almost always," said Paul. He palmed the pill but didn't take it, just held it in his fist.

* * *

Back in Montreal, the house in Milton Parc was still standing in spite of it all. Ox and the girls all streamed down the front steps to stand by the gate: Arlette was looking very subdued, holding an armload of folded blankets; Mars was glancing rapidly between her phone screen and the street as if expecting something else to descend upon them; Grace stepped out on the sidewalk with Ox to block the view of passers-by. There was a CTV newsvan on the corner but Paul couldn't see any more than that past Ox's wide shoulders. "No talking, I don't want to talk," he muttered before anybody could ask something.

Joel took over, thanking everyone like a junior diplomat as they went up the steps to the door, his arm around Paul to steer him. It wasn't exactly fake, Paul thought, with no rotting stink of dishonesty, but it had a hollow, dusty smell like an old filmstrip projector from one of the classrooms of his childhood: a set of images pulled up from an internal storage closet to keep other people busy, to put on a show when resources were actually low, and meanwhile to keep things in the dark. Joel did that kind of thing for other people, or he'd started to figure it out over the last few years, but he always seemed to forget the technique when he had to speak up for himself. 

_It's not a fucking act._

Paul went straight upstairs, not planning to come down for awhile. Maybe a week, or however long people let him get away with it. Safe. He put on some old trackpants softened by many launderings and a Metallica t-shirt that had drifted into his possession from a load of donated clothing. He used to wear it as a joke and now he didn't even notice the logo anymore. 

Joel faded out and reappeared a few times, running interference with the rest of the house and generally bustling. Fussing. The blankets, a garbage bag to get rid of the bloody clothes and the hospital gown, clean towels, a pot of tea that nobody was going to drink, adjusting the thermostat. 

"Can you just stop for a second?" Paul asked finally.

"What do you need?"

"I need you to _stop_ , that's what I just said. I'm not back from Gallipoli or something, it was just a couple of days."

"Three days. You don't have to pretend it wasn't bad just to get me to ease up, okay? I can dial it back." Joel turned the lamp on and the overhead off, sitting down on the end of Paul's bed. 

Paul picked up his pillow to squish it back into the shape he liked. "I don't want to have a huge conversation about every goddamn thing, but can we -- why was Kyle such an emergency?"

"I guess in retrospect he wasn't, since the military was right there, acting like God's gift to mutantkind. But we didn't know that." Joel took his shoes off, turning one over to look at the gunk on the sole. "Christ, I'm gonna have to pitch these too. Unless that's destroying evidence. It was an emergency because I knew for sure that he was there. The only reason we found you at all is because the Beaubier twins and Niko took a big risk and got the info from Alpha Flight's systems. They didn't feel good about hitting you and Prawn. They called me and Aurora was really upset about finding Kyle's file in there too. She met him once, and he's the one who told her about the house in the first place. So I felt like I owed it to her, and I owed it to him."

Paul didn't know if that was enough to forgive the Beaubiers, but it did take some of the edge off his feeling of betrayal. By ten percent or so. Maybe that was all he'd ever get. "But I was right there, I was asking you to -- fuck, never mind, this is stupid. I was right the first time, let's not talk this to death."

"Paul..." Joel got up to put his shoes in the garbage bag too. "If you felt like you weren't my top priority in there, well, you were. I was ready to do anything to get you out of there. We were lucky and we had Faiza -- I knew that between her and Prawn and Mr. Summers you'd be okay if I turned my back for a minute. If Logan hadn't been onboard I would have dropped it, because that would've made it too risky. I'm sorry I didn't explain that too well at the time and I'm sorry I yelled about it, but I don't think I did the wrong thing."

Paul looked down at the pillowcase, which had a small dark stain on it. More blood, but a familiar kind of stain: Joel's nocturnal seizures often left those little bloodstains behind on the bedclothes. "Did you sleep here, while I was gone?"

Joel tied off the garbage bag and straightened up again, his posture stiff, as if they were fighting. "Yeah."

For the moment, it answered Paul's worry, his fear that the raid on Weapon Plus was just another ethical gesture, just another _something I had to do_ , that it hadn't been personal at all. This was love, and it was real human love addressed to him, meant for him, private and luxurious. He didn't have to share it with anyone else. "Well, come back here, then." He put the pillow aside. "You like this bed, you can stay."

Joel came back to sit on the bed again, springs squeaking. "I called your mom, before we left the city."

Paul snorted. "And what, has she changed her outgoing voicemail message? Is there a song now?"

"No, she talked to me. I just -- I wanted to let her know what was happening, sort of. She's not sure how to feel, I don't think," said Joel. "She made some asshole comments but she also freaked out about her baby being in trouble. And I asked if she wanted me to pass anything along to you, and she said to tell you that she doesn't hate you."

"There's no Hallmark card for that?" The colour of a weathered old hurt washed over Paul, a rusty orange that bled into plum. "I mean, yeah, that's more than she would've said before. I guess I should be grateful or something."

"Nah." Joel moved closer on the bed, the sort of stop-and-start movement of trying to find space to sit on a crowded metro as people got on and off. A few inches here, an ass-cheek there. "Maybe something will grow there, but you don't have to be grateful for stuff that doesn't fully exist yet."

"Yeah -- dude, you don't have to be _this_ awkward, c'mon," Paul said. "If you feel weird about it--"

Joel gave up the attempt at being stealthy and just took the other side of the bed. "I didn't want to crowd you when you just got back, that's all."

"If I feel like you're crowding me, you'll know." Paul knew that _I'll tell you_ was a promise he might not be able to keep. They'd both seen enough twitchy, touch-averse kids to know that it was best to keep a distance, because reactions to touch could blow up like a sea-squall before there was time for polite warnings. He didn't think he had problems like that -- not just from three goddamn days, right? -- but if he did, the warning signs would be a lot more obvious on him. "I'm okay. I think I'm okay. At least right now." He settled on something that was easier to be certain about: "It's good to be home."

"I'm sure not going anywhere else for awhile, if I have anything to say about it," Joel said, adjusting the other pillow behind him as he sat back against the headboard. "Before the shit really hit the fan there, I was thinking like...there were just so many people stuck in that place that it felt like the only moral thing to do would be to keep going back. Snipe them a few prisoners at a time."

"I would literally kill you."

"I know."

"And I could do it, I know your weaknesses. Wait till you're zonked on Klonopin and then smother you with a pillow, that's the plan." Paul unfolded the blanket at the end of the bed. "So go on, the rest of this story is why you decided _not_ to get involved in the mutant activism equivalent of a land war in Asia, right?"

"Well, yeah, because I got a good dose of freakout with Dr. Hines. The woman Faiza healed, that was her name," Joel added. "Carol Hines."

Paul could pick that up, something more complex than Joel's usual, reflexive guilt. A bit of pride, like the green smell of rosemary, mixed in with the fishy uncertainty. "You think she'll be okay, after this?"

"More okay than if I'd left her there to bleed out, I guess. But I don't know. It was just..." He paused for awhile to choose a word. "A really off-label use of my power, let's say."

"Which you don't like." It wasn't a question; Paul knew.

"Not really." One of those subjects where Joel would have something more to say later, but right now the thoughts weren't ready yet. Paul liked that slowness in him, perhaps because it seemed to come from honesty as well as self-consciousness: only the right words would do, only in their own time. There was a particular smell when Joel was working through some private feeling, an exhaust from an internal engine, and Paul had always liked that scent too -- like a saw mill, the bright ticklish freshness of raw cedar. "I'm glad we helped people, but if we never did another superhero thing again it'd be too soon."

"Oh hey, I like this kind of talk," Paul said, faux-lascivious. "Keep going."

"You like that? Never again will we take a private stealth jet to Alberta. I swear on the head of Jesus." Joel rolled over to reach the bottle of Advil that sat on the table between the two beds, then decided he do the rest of his meds at the same time. "Let's never go west of Toronto again, in fact. I was trying to do too many things at once when I should have been focused on the house. The house is important."

"Yeah, it really is." Paul smiled. "Are you sure we can't rule out Toronto too?"

"I'd like to, but it's like the dentist, sometimes you gotta go in there." Joel took his night pills and brushed his teeth, making the familiar sequence of bathroom sounds: the clicks and rattles of pills against plastic, water humming in the house's old pipes, the small ringing of the water glass when it was set back down on the porcelain edge of the sink. 

Paul didn't want to move, though, and even if he probably needed a shower, he didn't want to go near the bathtub yet. Tomorrow. It could wait. 

When Joel came back to bed, he said, "How are you feeling, do you want to stay up and put Netflix on or something? Or just sleep?"

"I'm pretty tired," Paul said, but he wasn't sure. He'd taken years at St. Rita's to learn how to live in his body, to eat what he needed and regain a sense of strength. Now he felt again like his flesh was some alien attachment that he didn't understand. "I can't concentrate on watching something, but..."

"What?"

Paul hesitated. His emotions were always obvious, but sometimes a plain request could be even more of an exposure. And in spite of everything, he still didn't like exposure. "This is stupid, but read to me, maybe? I just -- I hated lying there in the dark with nobody there and nothing to listen to--"

"Of course, yeah," Joel said, interrupting an unnecessary explanation. He thumbed through the pile of books on the table. "French, English, does it matter?"

"English," Paul said. Joel's French was good, but the sounds of his English had an elasticity and life to it that a second language could never quite match. Paul wanted the sounds of life. "I don't care what, pick something."

So Joel went through the stack and picked out a book of Rilke's poems. Paul stacked his two pillows and turned on his side -- the right side, best for falling asleep, even though he always woke up on the left, facing the window. The comforter seemed too heavy, as if it might weigh him down if he needed to run, but the wool blanket was enough to keep him warm. He listened as Joel opened the book and started reading. Joel had the accent of a CBC newscaster, clean and crisp as a sliced apple, hard r's you could cut yourself on, a sharpness that wasn't there in his French; over time his accent in French had shaped itself to Paul's, imitating his middle-class turns of phrase.

 _I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enough_  
_to make every hour holy._  
_I am too small in the world, and yet not tiny enough_  
_just to stand before you like a thing,_  
_dark and shrewd._

 _I want my will, and I want to be with my will_  
_as it moves toward deed;_  
_and in those quiet, somehow hesitating times,_  
_when something is approaching,_  
_I want to be with those who are wise,_  
_or else alone._

 _I want always to be a mirror that reflects your whole being,_  
_and never to be too blind or old_  
_to hold your heavy, swaying image._  
_I want to unfold._  
_Nowhere do I want to remain folded,_  
_because where I am bent and folded, there I am a lie._

 _And I want my meaning_  
_true for you. I want to describe myself_  
_like a painting that I studied_  
_closely for a long, long time,_  
_like a word I finally understood,_  
_like the pitcher of water I use every day,_  
_like the face of my mother,_  
_like a ship_  
_that carried me_  
_through the deadliest storm of all._

* * *

They slept beside each other, not touching, separate but together. In Joel's Catholic vocabulary that sort of thing was supposed to be called a near occasion of sin, but it didn't feel that way; it wasn't a near occasion of anything. It just was. It felt full in itself, warm and close, not like an unbearable tension from wanting and not having. He was still afraid of how things would change if they did touch. Part of him was afraid that what had happened with Hodya would just repeat itself with Paul, that he was too broken to have any kind of romance like an adult human. Which was needlessly dramatic, but still. Scandal would tangle him up again. _I can't lose him, I can't lose him..._

Joel woke up first, and let Paul sleep. It was about time to be starting breakfast, and he'd already shuffled into the kitchen when he realised that something wasn't right. The house was too quiet, too empty -- usually a few kids were around at this hour, as morning chased them out of their nooks and warm places, leaving them with long hours to fill between five and seven as other shelters opened up. Ox had the bedroom off the front hall, and would lumber up and down to open the door in a somnolent murk, napping between knocks until he absolutely had to wake up properly. But today nobody was around in the living room or the front room, and there was a grey mutter of voices in the street.

_Oh no._

He had it figured out by the time his hand touched the front doorknob, but there it was anyway: a huddled mass of cameras and reporters gathered in the street, shining their lights in the winter morning darkness, two newsvans blocking Rue Sainte Famille. When the door opened, they all rose and surged up the long front steps, boom mics reaching out like spider's legs, tired cold bodies in parkas revving up again, cameras flashing.

"Whoa, whoa, okay, _no_ \--" Joel said, as if lecturing an overeager dog, but the questions had already started. The same ones as yesterday in Alberta. " _No_ , listen, listen..."

They all went quiet except for the shutter-clicks, attentive. It was almost worse. For a moment Joel tried to cobble together a statement in his head, since he vaguely remembered that he'd promised to make one, but he knew that whatever he said off the cuff first thing in the morning would only cause him grief later. "Look, guys, you're in the way of hungry kids who want to eat. They're going to find you very intimidating so we would love it if you could, um, not be right here." 

That wouldn't get him far unless he made a concession as well, he thought, and sure enough somebody called out, "Is there a statement forthcoming?"

The media wouldn't be here at all if they had anything more official to go on, Joel knew, and since he wasn't running for office or trying to promote a reality show, he wasn't going to get any benefit out of performing in the circus in the meantime. They'd come to his house because his address was already publicised, and they just wanted something to run with. He needed to know if he or Paul were facing charges, so he'd have to talk to a lawyer before saying anything about the case. "I'll release something after the PM comments."

A woman's hoarse voice from the back of the crowd. "Did you leak the Neurocherche files to the _Citizen_?"

"No comment." That was a fig-leaf, he was pretty sure. Veronica Geier at the _Citizen_ probably knew, either because he was the most likely suspect or because some faint trace of data left behind in the files had betrayed him, even with Will's help. But that didn't mean he had to admit it on his own doorstep before breakfast. "So that's it, and thanks for clearing out and making room for the kids," he said, using one of his father's most blatant techniques: _assume that they've already agreed to do what you want, and be magnanimous about it._ "We really appreciate it. Go get warm, have a good day, _bonne journée._ "

* * *

Joel's mother sent a media spokesman over from Ottawa, some family friend whose name he knew but whose face didn't ring a bell. "Don't worry about anything," she said on the phone. "I'm sending Nunzio over, he'll take care of you."

This sounded comforting until they met Nunzio Sbaraglia, who was comically unassuming, a rumpled, doughy man with thinning brown hair and washed-out blue eyes. He looked kind and sleepy, not the kind of shark Joel had been hoping for. 

But he did get to work.

"Statement? No, no, you should give an interview," Nunzio said immediately, while he was still taking his coat off. "We'll prep you, we'll try to get the questions in advance and set conditions, but you? You look so harmless, once you get on camera nobody's going to believe you're any kind of serious problem. On paper you sound kind of scary. Personal wealth, political connections, religious, impossible to imprison. That's kinda freaky. But get a camera on you and all that goes away. Skinny shy college kid. You look like a bad sunburn would do you in. That's good. Statement will make you seem cagey. Interview. On camera. Trust me."

Joel was dubious, since in person he sounded inarticulate at best, and doped up on his anxiety meds at worst. But Nunzio seemed to think that the best strategy was to downplay everything Joel thought he was semi-good at, in order to make him seem less threatening.

"Unless -- well, let me back up. You already told the jackals that you'll say something after the PM does, right? Okay, that does commit us to a statement. Damn. But we'll get an interview lined up anyway, because it'll help you. I mean, legal issues, but you've got a lawyer to vet everything for you. Now, your partner -- oh, wow, thanks," Nunzio said as Arlette gave him a cup of coffee. He hadn't sat down yet. "Keep Paul out of the public eye. He's visually interesting so they'll want another look at him, but take a hard line there. Because I bet he doesn't want to be gawked at, right?"

"Right."

"Yeah, he's recovering, he has a right to his privacy, all that stuff. The other reason is that physical mutants creep people out. I'm sorry, I know, okay?" said Nunzio before anyone else could say anything, holding up one hand in surrender as he sat down at the kitchen table. "I know it's gross, but that's reality. Average baseline human is 18% more positive to the concept of mutant rights before they're shown a picture of a physical mutant. Then the numbers plummet. I hate it too."

"Look, the story doesn't make sense if we don't discuss physical mutants," Joel said. He was happy to protect Paul, but not to throw other physical mutants under the bus. "They were the majority of Weapon Plus victims. The reason Weapon Plus was allowed to operate with impunity was because physical mutants are seen as less than human--"

"I know. You can talk about the issue all you want, talking doesn't trigger the downturn in opinion. I'm on your side, but I'm telling you what will happen. When people think of mutants, we want them to picture vulnerable, lovable kids that they can relate to," Nunzio said, looking up at Joel and the others in the kitchen. "Because that's what you really are. We introduce the rest of the truth slowly. When someone's been starving to death and you feed them, you have to go slow. A little at a time, or their bodies won't handle it. You do the same when people are starved for the truth about an oppressed group of people. They're sick at first, and they take the truth in slowly."

"This is just typical coloniser bullshit," said Nour, who was watching with folded arms from the doorway. "Everybody I know who feels weird around physical mutants -- and that includes other mutants who _can_ pass -- they got over it by seeing more of what scared them, not less."

"Yeah, that's probably true when you're talking about people interacting with others in real life, because you usually don't have a choice about who you deal with, right?" said Nunzio. "Your neighbour is your neighbour. Or your co-worker or your niece or whoever. There's a social pressure to deal with their existence. But in media, people can choose to turn the page, flip the channel, block and unfollow. On a broader scale, yes, it helps to have more representation to smooth the path. We're just working on one thread of the story, though, and we have to be careful with that thread. Too much stress and it will snap."

"Okay, well, no matter how we decide to approach the topic of physical mutants, Paul is going nowhere near a camera anytime soon, so we all agree on that," Joel said. 

"Good. Now, whatever you release in a statement, they'll edit it down, but you should still keep it short and punchy. Twitter-ready," said Nunzio, and he opened his briefcase to hand over some stapled papers that looked a lot like a short-answer quiz. "Homework. Come up with some answers to the sample questions. I'll help you make the answers shorter, and your lawyer will help you stay out of jail. Or whatever the government thinks it can do to you. Who's your lawyer?"

Joel had to check his phone to have a hope of remembering the name. "Uh, let's see -- oh, Olwen Davies, okay. My uncle likes her."

"I like her too, she's good. Right." Nunzio noticed the coffee again and reached over for the sugar bowl. "Fill in the sample questions. Keep it very, very positive. Tell them what you _do_ believe in, not what you don't. Don't even think about using the word 'flatscan'. I know you wouldn't, of course not. I'm just saying. Mention how much you love this country. And don't talk about your father. Everyone else will do that for you."

Joel obediently took the homework to the front room and muddled through the questions, while Nunzio made calls and thumbed out texts, pacing up and down the hallway, floorboards creaking under his slow step. 

_What is the most important thing you want the public to know about you and your story?_

The house still didn't feel totally right. Kids had started trickling back for meals once the reporters were gone from the street, but they were fewer in number. Prawn was gone, staying in the house down the street with Faiza and Will, preparing to go back to England. And probably being debriefed, Joel thought, but that was okay. Prawn deserved a real chance to live his own life, and he was lucky that he could get away clean. Kyle hadn't stayed in Montreal -- he had a place in Ottawa and he wanted to be alone. Understandable. And Paul wasn't eating downstairs yet, and Joel thought he deserved a few days of room service before getting any gentle lectures about tolerating social discomfort. Joel had sat at the table with everyone else and pretended to be no more worried than usual, and brought Paul's dinner upstairs afterward.

But the house would be okay in a few weeks, when things settled down. 

_Do you feel that the public has any serious misconceptions about your story?_

Joel still felt that he'd betrayed his principles by going to Weapon Plus -- even if Carol Hines was the only one to suffer violence there, she was one too many. He wasn't going to say as much to Paul, or to anyone else either; Paul would be hurt, and other people would just give him some lecture about how nobody could stay pure in the real world. As if that meant it wasn't worth trying. As if there was something suspect about trying at all. _You can't be afraid to get your hands dirty._ Not as though dirty hands were an unfortunate consequence of doing the needful, but as if the dirty hands themselves meant something good.

_In an ideal world, how would you like your situation to resolve--_

Nunzio leaned in the doorway. "Change of plans," he said. "The PM made a statement and it's stupid as hell. It's better than stupid, it's _weak._ He's blowing in the wind. We're going on the offensive."

* * *

**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

Montréal, January 18 — Mutant rights activist Joel McCree released the following statement today, regarding the discovery of the Weapon Plus facility in Alberta:

"Regarding Mr. Turcott's statement that the Canadian government had no connection with Weapon Plus, all I can say is that he's mistaken. All my information about the facility's location came from government sources in Ottawa. If Mr. Turcott were correct, my friends and I would never have found the place. 

"My friends and I made concrete, documented efforts to pursue justice through traditional channels. We reported Neurocherche to the Ministry of Health. We called dozens of local safety centres asking the whereabouts of Paul Laliberté and Francis Dudley. We would have loved to leave it to the pros, and if we'd known Canadian Forces were going to Weapon Plus, I would have been very relieved. Unfortunately, the reality is that when we asked for help we were ignored.

"At St. John of God House, we believe in the value of every person, whether mutant or not. We believe that every person should have a place where they are not only tolerated, not only accepted, but welcome. We believe we are responsible for each other. Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement, said 'We cannot go to heaven by ourselves. God will ask us, "Where are the others?"' I think we should be asking ourselves this question all the time. Where _are_ the others? Are they safe? Are they fed? Do they have dignity under the law, and freedom, and enough control over their own lives that they can make meaningful decisions? Those of us who are comfortable and happy, are we reconciled with the disadvantaged? Are we doing justice to them, or do we have lingering feelings of guilt, resentment, hostility, judgement? Can we all go to heaven together?

"Canada is a secular country, thank God. Our government can't make any promises about heaven. But dignity and freedom are very much Canada's business. Right now, for mutants, that business isn't exactly booming. I believe that can change. We could spend decades continuing on this path of fear, abuse, and violence, or we could stop. We could just stop.

"They're talking on the Hill about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for mutants in this country. My sources say it has broad appeal among the different parties, whether Conservative or Liberal or NDP, and that gives me hope. I'm glad Mr. Turcott is so willing to address this. We don't have to wait for bigger tragedies. Even now, it's not too late to confront injustice and make things right." 

For additional information: Nunzio Sbaraglia is the media spokesman for Mr. McCree, M. Laliberté, and others associated with St. John of God House. He can be reached at nsbaraglia@breakawayconsulting.ca.

-30-

* * *

"So who are these sources on the Hill?" said Paul, over Chinese delivery the following night. He'd slept straight through dinner and had a small meltdown over it, freaked out by the missing chunk of time. Joel had calmed him down with an Ativan and the delivery menu. _It's okay, we can eat now, just pick something._ Paul had found a news segment about the house running on Newsworld, a few shots of the limestone walls and a droning CBC voice reading Joel's statement.

"It's just a little light Astroturfing," Joel said as he cracked his chopsticks apart. "If that's even the right term. I made up the sources, in other words. I have no idea if there's any consensus about a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But if Turcott thinks it has widespread appeal, he might try to steal the policy from the Opposition, since that's been his game plan lately. He's angling to be the good guy who turned the country around."

"So you just lied to the press to goad Turcott into using his enemies' ideas."

Joel shrugged. "He wants a way out of this mess. That's good, so we should let him find his way to the door. That's not lying, that's just bluffing. It's bullshit."

Paul peeled the cover off the styrofoam container of cherry sauce, pouring a little pool of it on his plate. "More than just bullshit."

"Horseshit?"

"Okay, Father of Lies, whatever you say." They were sitting together on the couch in the TV room, the first time all week that Paul had been back downstairs. He was still afraid of facing a normal day in the house, afraid of smelling pity from the others. Pity, or that strange form of sympathetic fear that people felt around victims. _I don't know what to say to you, I don't like knowing that this happened to you, because now I know it could happen to me too._ Soon Paul would just have to suck it up and let people feel whatever they felt about it, but not yet. "This sounds good, though. It's encouraging."

"I think the CBC likes us, yeah. The papers are kind of all over the place, and I've been scared to look at the blogosphere."

"Yeah, you're not allowed to look at blogs right now," said Paul. "I need you to be the stable one for awhile."

He meant it as a joke, but it didn't land that way. "I will be," Joel said after a little pause. "I can do that."

"I know," Paul said, overlapping him. "Of course I do."

And he did know. They were David and Jonathan, and Paul knew that he was Jonathan in this equation: important, but not the one who was really going to matter in the history books. That was fine with him -- he knew that history was a net that swept the sea, and the little fish that escaped were the lucky ones. Everyone who had to live out in public was in danger of the net, and everyone who scraped out some privacy had a hiding place. Joel was going to get caught in the net sooner or later, since he couldn't seem to leave well enough alone, but they were both stronger now than they were five years ago. If Paul needed to coast for awhile and get his head back together, they were strong enough for that.

They went to bed together again, without discussing it, still not really touching. Not naked, no kissing, only a whispered exchange of _I love you, j't'aime_ in the dark. They were waiting for Easter, but there was this much to last them through Lent.

Joel warmed the bed like an electric blanket, his body efficiently putting out heat while Paul's was always at a deficit, cold in the night. When Paul woke in the dark from a forgotten dream that left his skin prickling, he pressed closer to that warm body in his bed. Joel didn't wake up. He slept heavily on his meds, always out like a light a few minutes after his head hit the pillow. But when Paul put an arm around his waist, he moved in his sleep and settled closer with a rustle of the sheets, a soft exhale of breath, welcoming. Joel half-woke, lifting his head from the pillow in inquiry, but Paul just pressed his mouth to his shoulder. " _J't'aime,_ " he whispered again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of _The Heart's Landscape_ , and a third novel rounds this story out into a trilogy. _[A Warm Spirit](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7849993)_ follows this same bunch of idiots through political repercussions, relationship developments, and a couple of new controversies. (I apologise for writing the slowest romance ever.)
> 
> Thanks for reading so far. I know the audience for this kind of thing is small, and I appreciate each and every one of you. Comments are always very, very welcome.


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